


Defy These Stars

by AstrophysicalBean



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Horror, I basically made up Nicole's entire family and backstory, Nicole has a shady backstory because that just steeps my tea, Soulmates, Supernatural Nicole Haught, a lot of swearing, everyone you love will eventually get a happy ending I promise, please don't tell your parents what a bad influence I am with swearing, quite a bit of asskicking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-19
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-05-08 19:25:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 49,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14700633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstrophysicalBean/pseuds/AstrophysicalBean
Summary: Nicole Haught makes a living as a bounty hunter, using her unique gifts as a Seer to track down criminals across the country. She hates this power—hates what it has made her become. But one night a strange and dangerous woman with a gun gives her a new job: Go to Purgatory to spy on a man named Xavier Dolls, and await further instructions. There, she meets his colleagues: Wynonna Earp, who hides a tragic face Underneath; and Waverly Earp, the most angelic woman Nicole has ever met. But Purgatory is a dangerous place, and it's more than just a town. It's a prison for everything Nicole has been hiding from for years. And sleeping dogs, like everyone else, cannot lie to her.





	1. The Woman Who Said Her Name Was Alicia

Henry Davidson stepped confidently into a small coffee shop on the corner of Main and Port, head held high and gaze even, scanning each of the faces dotted around the sparsely populated shop. He smiled broadly when his eyes landed on a willowy redhead seated at the corner booth, sipping from her steaming mug pensively. The woman looked up at the sound of the bell ringing above the door, and met his eye, a small smile fluttered nervously across her face. Her eyes were warm, perhaps the softest shade of chocolate that he had ever seen.

He almost felt _bad_.

Almost.

He crossed the small café in a few strides, head held high and gaze even, confident.

“Alicia?” he asked, as if he were unsure—hopeful, even—though he held no doubt in his mind of who she was.

The woman leaned back in her seat to take him in fully. “Henry?” She asked in a soft voice that sounded like how coming home felt.

Henry nodded, not letting the smile on his face falter once, though his face muscles were already beginning to ache. He wasn’t used to smiling this _sincerely_ for so long. “The very same,” he gave a charming little bow, and she giggled—actually _giggled_ , a high and pealing sound that could have made flowers bloom. And those insufferably endearing dimples—God, could she _be_ any sweeter? He slid into the booth, across from her, before she could motion him to.

“It’s so great to finally meet you in person,” she said.

“You as well, although I must confess feel like I already know you.” Henry replied, feeding every drop of sincerity he could muster into his words.

She laughed again, light and happy. “Well, I mean, there’s not much else to know about me besides what’s on my profile.”

 _No_ , Henry thought to himself smugly, _no there’s not, and there’s going to be a whole lot less by the time the day is done_.

This was not something he could say on a date, of course. Even one that was just a farce, like this one. She didn’t know it was a farce, and therefore he had to be on his best behaviour. He waved her comment off humbly. “Oh, come on, I’m sure there’s so much more to you than what you put on eHarmony.”

“No, really, I’m pretty boring,” Alicia said dismissively.

“Respectfully, I'm going to have to disagree. What do you do for fun?” He asked. Keep the conversation on her—that’s how it was done. Keep _her_ talking and she won’t know enough to help the cops identify _you_.

It was an irrelevant question, of course. He had looked her up just before meeting up with her. He knew who she was.

Alicia shrugged humbly. “Not much, really,” she said. “I don’t get a lot of time off from work.”

“You’re an actuary, right?” He asked.

She nodded. “Yeah, I am. A bit nerdy, but,” she shrugged again. It seemed to be a bit of a habit of hers. Annoying. “It pays the bills.”

“And _then_ some, I should guess, don’t actuaries make like a hundred thousand a year to start?”

Alicia rolled her eyes playfully. “Like, eighty thousand, but that’s not the point. I like the math.”

Henry laughed. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say the words ‘ _I like the math_ ’ in my entire life.”

She swatted his arm in mock offense but leaned closer over the table nonetheless. Her eyes darkened just a shade, and her voice dropped to just a murmur. “Play your cards right and that’s not the only shocking thing you’ll hear today.” Her eyes were dancing with a mischievous sort of light, like she had a secret she desperately wanted to share, and for a moment, Henry thought about it. She was cute, if a little naïve, and she was looking at him like she had devious plans for him. That was definitely something he could get behind. Or on top of.

So he leaned into it, letting his own voice drop to a sultry level. “No?” he rested his elbow on the table between them, and his chin in his palm. “What else am I going to hear, then?”

She smiled wider, more luxuriously, leaning toward him as well.

Reached for something under the table.

Faster than he could blink, she swept his hand out from underneath his chin and snapped a handcuff around the extended wrist. His face fell, smacked on the tabletop, and pain exploded across the bridge of his nose. Blood flowed free.

“ _What the f—_ ”

Stars danced across his eyes as the woman who had said her name was Alicia stood from the booth, spun around faster than any actuary should be able to, and twisted his handcuffed arm around his back. She moved with a grace and agility one did not get from using a calculator all day.

“God, please, no more talking,” she said in a voice that had dropped every ounce of its sweetness and was now filled with venom and ire. “I honestly think I got about six times gayer from this, so thank you, I hadn’t even realized it was possible.”

She locked the other handcuff in place, pinning Henry’s arms behind his back, squeezing the cuffs (probably) too tight around his wrists. Henry thrashed madly against the restraints, but the woman’s grip on him was iron-tight. “What? — _OW_ — _Fuck!_ ”

Alicia snorted derisively. “Not on your life, buddy.” She moved to pull him up from the booth, but quick as a dart the man surged up, driving his shoulder hard into her solar plexus, knocking her backward. She stumbled, arms pinwheeling, into the table behind her, where a young couple had been enjoying a nice lunch together before they both had to return to work.

Of course, neither of them had expected their lunch to be interrupted by a tall redheaded woman who apparently kept a pair of handcuffs on her at all times—because, really, how can one prepare for something like that? Unless one was hoping to run into a redhead with handcuffs—and so they had both ordered the soup of the day. Tomato, by the smell of the scalding hot liquid that splashed on Alicia’s arm.

Coffee cups and saucers crashed to the ground with loud noises— _crack!_ —and the woman screamed as Alicia’s hand landed directly on her side plate. The plate cracked almost perfectly in half, cutting her palm deeply as she pushed off the table. She grit her teeth against the pain.

The woman who had said her name was Alicia (but who, Henry was beginning to suspect, was not actually named Alicia) launched herself at him as he made for the door. She crashed into him, slamming the door shut with his face. The glass hissed and cracked in spiderwebs around his bleeding nose. She dug her fingers into the skin of his neck, and blood poured freely down the back of his shirt from the cut on her palm.

“Nice try, really,” she hissed in his ear. “But you’re going to pay for that woman’s soup, and for everything else you’ve ever taken that wasn’t yours.”

“What—?” He started, turning his head back to get a look at the woman who was holding his arms behind him with an iron grip. “Who the fuck are you?”

She slammed an elbow into the back of his head and stars exploded before his eyes. “Doesn’t matter, but I know who you are, Henry Davidson. CPA, embezzled nearly three hundred thousand from your company in Seattle before you cut and run, hopped the border into Canada. You’ve been hiding out here ever since, conning poor, defenseless women whenever you need money. There’s, what, four outstanding warrants for your arrest, I think? That’s impressive.”

Understanding dawned in his eyes and his blood ran cold. “You’re a bounty hunter.” 

She laughed. “What gave it away, was it the handcuffs? It’s usually the handcuffs.”

Lifting her weight off his back, she kept a white-knuckled grip on the back of his shirt collar, ignoring the blood that was now running rivulets down her arm, dripping to the floor from her elbow. She cast a look back at the coffee shop, at the damage that had been done. The ruined meals, the broken cups and plates and saucers, and the other patrons in the shop stunned into silence. They stared at her, eyes wide, jaws dropped. A waitress stood behind the counter on the other side of the shop, hands frozen halfway to the phone on the wall behind her.

“I am so sorry,” she said sincerely to the waitress, who seemed to be the highest-ranking worker on duty. “I promise I’ll come back to pay for the damages.”

The waitress could only nod, pale-faced and tight-lipped. She looked terrified. Perhaps terrified of the woman who was getting blood all over her shop. Perhaps terrified of what her manager was going to say when she saw what had happened.

The man who was still pinned against the glass door grunted again as he tried once more to wrestle himself out of the bounty hunter’s grip, and the bleeding woman sighed, apparently deciding she had had enough of this. “Let’s go, asshole. There’s a nice bounty waiting for me at the police station, and I really should get this cut looked at.”

Out in the street, a few passersby gave the pair cautious glances over their shoulders, veering widely around them as the hunter all but dragged her bounty to her car parked across the street. She paid them no mind, shoving Henry Davidson into her back seat without ruth, slamming the door shut before he could try to get away again. She didn’t bother to tell him to buckle up, just locked his door and slid into the driver’s seat.

As she turned the key in the ignition, her old Chevy truck springing to life, Henry Davidson leaned forward, planting his face in the space between her seat and the front passenger’s seat. “Just answer me one question, will you?”

The woman who had said her name was Alicia snorted, but she didn’t say no, so he continued on anyway. “How did you find me?”

Her jaw tightened, teeth clenched. “I’m good at what I do, Mr. Davidson. I’m good at seeing through poker faces.”

* * *

The presiding deputy at the Asherton police station ten miles away paid Nicole $30,000 for the return of Henry Davidson and gave her an Asherton PD training shirt from someone’s locker to wrap around her still-bleeding hand while she filled out the paperwork.

“I don’t know how you do it, Haught.” The Sheriff’s deputy whistled as he re-entered the precinct’s bull pen from locking Mr. Davidson in holding. The deputy was a man who was the walking definition of the suffix “ _ish_ ”. He was short- _ish_ , his hair was dark- _ish_ , his uniform was neat- _ish_ , he looked trustworthy- _ish_. He was not anyone who looked like they were a significant part of anyone’s life, nor was he particularly imposing or powerful in stature. In fact, he had a habit of blending into any scene in which he stood.

But he was a kind man, and a hard worker in the Sheriff’s department, and he always had a new case for Nicole to track down when she needed work. He was a good friend. She was grateful.

“We’ve been trying to track down Davidson for six months. And you just waltz on in here and find him in three weeks.”

Nicole chuckled, smiling as the deputy sat down at his desk, across from where she had pulled up a chair and was using the edge of the desk to fill out the required forms for transfer of a fugitive. She made sure to keep her eyes downcast, though. The deputy had noticed that about her almost immediately. She rarely ever looked people in the eye. “It’s just talent, Paul.” She said boastfully. “Pure talent.”

“And yet for some reason you don’t want to join the force officially.” The deputy said, prodding once more at the soft spot he knew was there. A muscle in the bounty hunter’s jaw twitched, and she blew a hard breath out her nose.

“Don’t start with this again, Paul,” she warned in a low voice, drilling her eyes into the paperwork before her. “Please.”

“I won’t, I won’t,” he appeased, holding his hands up in surrender. “I’m just saying, you could make a hell of a lot bigger difference behind a badge.”

Nicole sped up her writing, trying to get through the pages as fast as she could. The cut on her hand was starting to pulse. It was _definitely_ going to need stitches. “Yeah, but I’d have to wear those khakis. Not worth it.”

Paul looked offended. “The khakis are a classic pant and you know it.”

Nicole crinkled her nose and signed the last page. She shut her pen with a definitive _click_ and laid it on the paperwork. She forced a smile. “No dice, Paul. You know I don’t like staying anywhere long.”

Paul rolled his eyes but accepted the excuse nonetheless. He took the stack of paper as she offered it to him, the both of them standing. “You can pick up the cheque from Laurie in accounting on your way out.”

Nicole smiled warmly. “Thanks again, Paul.”

Paul waved her off. “Anytime, Haught.” He stuck out a hand to shake hers, but as she reached out to reciprocate, she stopped. Looked down. Laughed. It was the left hand he was going to shake—the one that was slowly bleeding through some guy’s shirt. Paul laughed. “You can keep the shirt; I’ll get Wallace a new one.”

Nicole nodded, and settled for waving goodbye over her shoulder as she left the bull pen, heading down the hall to see Laurie in accounting.

* * *

It was nearly midnight by the time Nicole returned to her apartment, six stitches in her left hand, stolen bloody t-shirt in a biohazardous waste bag from the ER’s nursing station, and a cheque for $30,000 tucked safely into her wallet. She’d cash it in the morning, figure out where to go next after that.

But first, she needed a shower. She needed to wash the crusted blood off her arm. She needed a God damned _drink_.

She took a deep breath of the stifling summer air and leaned against the door, closing her eyes to the darkness. Let nighttime wash over her like a favourite blanket. There were no noises here; no crashing of coffee cups on a linoleum floor, no cars chasing after her, no criminals or lawmen asking questions she didn’t want to answer. It was silence, and it let the lies all melt away. There was no room to lie, if you couldn’t make any noise.

It was almost like bliss, for a moment.

After another moment of silence, of darkness, of living in the night and pretending the world didn’t exist outside of this living room, she kicked off her ratty combat boots, left them lying haphazardly by the door. Shrugged off her canvas jacket and threw it across the back of the couch. Unbuttoned her shirt and let it pool on the floor. Jeans were shed and left one leg strewn out in front of the other, as if they were in the middle of taking a step on their own. Socks, undershirt, watch, wallet, all dropped on the floor as she walked, too tired to put them anywhere in particular. She’d find them in the morning.

By the time she reached the bathroom, flicked on the light, and stood in front of the vanity, Nicole stood in just her sports bra and boxer shorts. She leaned her good hand against the laminate countertop and took a moment to breath, to study her own face in the mirror.

She looked tired—she _was_ tired, yes, but more importantly she _looked_ it. The bags under her eyes looked like harsh bruises in the artificial white lighting of the bathroom, and her cheeks looked hollow and sunken in. Her hair, red as flame, was pulled in a small ponytail at the back of her head, just a small nub of all the hair she could manage to get tied up. It normally fell to just past her chin, but sometimes it annoyed her still, and she tried to get as much of it out of her way as possible. The rest of it stuck out at odd angles around her face, unruly and unkempt. There was a bit of dried soup crusted in a lock by her right ear. Tomato. She crinkled her nose.

It was her eyes most of all that looked tired. They stared back at her in the mirror listlessly, without light in them. Empty.

She let them glaze over, lose their direction in sight, let her face blur in the mirror, and for a moment she almost saw— _something_ — almost saw the Underneath. But then it was gone, just like it always was.

She squeezed her eyes shut.

Moving away from the mirror, she started the shower and stripped the last of her clothes. Jumped in and let the scalding hot water wash away the hollow feeling that had begun to gnaw at her insides once again.

Soap, shampoo, conditioner. Scrub away the feeling of lying so much to one person for three weeks, when she knew he never would have been able to lie to her in return. Scrub away the feeling of being  _Alicia Rutherford, actuary and lover of long hikes, puppies, and believing in the mercy of fate_. 

Sure, Henry Davidson was not a good person. He was, in fact, a pretty horrible person, all things considered. But that didn’t mean he didn’t deserve his privacy. Everyone deserved their own privacy. Everyone deserved to have their thoughts and their histories to themselves. No matter what, everyone deserved their privacy. Nicole believed that above almost anything else in this world. She thought that idly as her hand reached up of its own accord and ghosted across the tattoo stamped on her left shoulder blade like a brand, faded slightly with time but there all the same.

She snatched her hand down as soon as she realized what she was doing.

_Don’t think about it._

Instead, she forced herself to finish up the shower, towel off, and pad into the bedroom next door to get dressed for bed. Five minutes later, she was dressed in a ratty University of Toronto, Department of Anthropology t-shirt and clean boxer shorts, rubbing the last droplets of water from her hair that was already beginning to curl in the wet humidity that always seemed to hang in the air these days. It was August, and the long summer nights had become stuffy, stagnant, suffocating. Such was the curse of living so far from the ocean, in a small town a few hours north of Edmonton. Still, didn’t mean she couldn’t be annoyed by it.

Walking to the kitchen, she was lost in thought—thoughts of the day, thoughts of where she might go next, thoughts of what she wanted to drink to wash away the dull ache of the lies and the cut in her hand that still remained. So lost in thought, in fact, that she hadn’t even noticed the woman sitting in her living room, until a small _click_ cut through the silence of the night, louder than any gunshot she knew that click to precede.

Nicole’s blood froze.

She turned mid-step toward the woman, muscles tensing, ready to fight.

The woman sat in her armchair, legs crossed, leaning back with a leisurely stature that said she wasn’t afraid of Nicole in the least—that _she_ was in control here.

And she was, by the look of the gun that she had trained on Nicole.

“Good evening, Nicole Haught.” The woman said in a cool, calm voice, as if she were giving Nicole the time of day. “I was hoping we could have a chat. I find myself in need of your services.”

* * *

Nicole decided that this woman was a knife. A well-crafted, well-concealed, military grade knife. The woman was still seated in her overstuffed armchair that probably smelled vaguely of dirty laundry—most of her things smelled of dirty laundry, when she was on a case; she didn’t have much time for personal upkeep when she was in need of money. But she sat with an air about her that seemed to be a warning to anyone who looked at her:  _Do not cross me. Do not tempt me like that._

Nicole wasn’t sure what would happen if someone did—if someone willingly cut themselves on that knife—but she knew it would be nothing good.

The woman wore something that could have been a tactical suit from New York Fashion Week: A nice, formfitting blouse that looked to be made of stretchy, perforated material for easy breathing, easy movement in a fight. Black slacks that looked to be tailored just for her, hugging her legs  _just_  intimately enough to lead the eyes down their length to the sleek black heels she wore that looked sharp enough to gouge an eye out.

Her blonde hair was pulled back tightly into a bun, not a single wisp out of place, not a single fly-away. But try as Nicole might, she couldn’t see the woman’s face clearly; despite the lamplight, it was still too dark. All she could see was a sharp nose, a severe jawline, and a pair of lips that didn’t look as if they even knew how to smile anymore.

The eyes were a mystery.

Something about the way this woman sat so assuredly—so at ease in this situation, as if she already knew what was going to happen by the end of it—told Nicole that this was on purpose.  

Nicole sat across from the woman in her living room, feeling underdressed, unprepared, utterly vulnerable and violated. Sure, she didn’t think of this apartment as her home, but it was supposed to be safe here.  _She_  was supposed to be safe here.

The woman scrutinized Nicole for just a moment longer before clearing her throat and setting the gun down on the side table beside her. “You’re a bounty hunter.”

It wasn’t a question. “And you’re in my apartment.”

The woman ignored her. “I need you to find someone for me.”

Nicole started to shake her head. “I don’t really do freelance, but have you tried Google? Google can find anything.”

The woman crossed one leg over the other. That was the only sign she gave away that Nicole was getting under her skin. Nicole would take it. “Google isn’t you,” the woman said.

“Look, I’m flattered, really,” Nicole said. “Breaking and entering into my apartment and pointing a gun at me aside, you seem like a great person. But it’s late, my hand only just stopped bleeding, and I’d like to get some rest, so if you just take a number, call my receptionist in the morning—”

“Do you _ever_ stop talking?” The woman interrupted.

“Do you ever knock on people’s doors, or is B-and-E just your go-to? Do you even have keys to your own apartment, or do you just pick the lock every time?”

The woman snorted derisively. “I guess there’s my answer.”

“And I didn’t get mine, how rude.”

The woman said nothing for a moment—Nicole wondered what the look on her face was at the moment. Was she annoyed? Nicole hoped so. Then the woman only sighed. “God, you’re going to be _such_ a headache to work with, I can tell.”

Nicole raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t say I’d agree to work with you.”

“Not yet,”

“I think your gun is going off a _bit_ early—”

“You don’t _want_ my gun to go off, Ms. Haught.” Her voice was sharp, unforgiving. Her patience was wearing thin. Nicole snapped her mouth shut with a _click_ of her teeth. The woman waited another moment, watching Nicole to see if she’d run her mouth off again. When she didn’t, the woman let out a sigh. “Finally.” Nicole had to bite her tongue to keep from replying. “It’s a simple enough job, really. Just find someone for me, keep tabs on him.”

“And if I don’t take the job?” Nicole asked.

The woman uncrossed her legs and leaned forward with her forearms braced on her knees, hands clasped. In this position, a shaft of moonlight filtering into the living room from the window in the kitchen fell across her face, and her eyes drilled deliberately into Nicole’s. Nicole could feel the pull of them, feel her eyes being drawn in. She met the woman’s gaze, and the woman let Nicole into her mind. Her Under Face flickered in and out of existence in Nicole’s Sight, as if someone were turning it on and off with a switch. Nicole swallowed.

It reminded Nicole of a wolf she had seen once, somewhere in a forest in northern Quebec. It had just been a small whelp of a thing, probably the runt of its litter. It had gotten its paw caught in a bear trap, and by the time Nicole found it, it had nearly ripped its own leg off trying to get away. It was a gory, disgusting sight that had made Nicole’s stomach turn. Nicole had tried to free its paw, but the second she stepped too close the wolf had gone rabid, snarling, snapping—she had almost lost a hand to its unforgiving jaws trying to get the damn trap open. The thing before her was supposed to be the epitome of power, of grace, of agility—it was supposed to be an apex predator. But it was so terrified, so trapped, so much in pain, that it was reduced to a rabid, cowering thing. It could have been a beautiful beast, had it any sense left to act like it. Instead, it lashed out in all directions. It was completely unpredictable, and there was nothing Nicole could do to save it.

The woman looked just the same Underneath: trapped and rabid and predictable only in the sense that Nicole was about to lose a hand or her life, if she got too close.

The woman’s lips curled into a razor-sharp smile, and Nicole didn’t need to ask to know that the woman knew what Nicole had just Seen. This woman knew that Nicole could See. She _knew_.

A shiver crawled up Nicole’s spine, and her eyes dropped to the floor.

“If you don’t take the job,” the woman said, “then I’m going to find your grandmother—Ava Keelan, is it? Kindly old lady, temper just a bit on the short side? Does she still take her tea with two sugars, or has her doctor finally gotten her to cut down on that?”

Nicole’s hands clenched into fists so tight that she felt a stitch pop in her left palm. A drop of blood welled up through her fingertips and dripped onto the carpet. “Don’t you _dare_ touch my family.” Her voice was so deathly quiet she might have wondered if the woman could hear the blood roaring in her veins and the heart hammering against her rip cage—might have wondered this, yes, had she been of exactly sound mind right then. However, the blood _was_ roaring in her ears, and her heart _did_ feel like it was about to punch through her rib cage and attack the woman sitting across her coffee table. So instead, she just worked the muscles in her jaw and thought of nothing at all besides one abstract thought: _She is a threat and she wants me to know it and I will_ not _let her hurt my family._

The woman smirked, and anger burned so brightly within Nicole it felt as if she had swallowed a dying star. “I won’t have to,” the woman said. “If you do your job, and you do it well.”

Nicole took a moment to breath, to shake out the ringing in her ears, but she kept her hands clenched in fists. “You can’t find anyone else for the job?” _Someone with even less to lose than I do._

The woman leaned back now, shielding her eyes from the moonlight.

The whelp was back in its cage.

“I suppose I could,” she began in a cruel voice that felt like nails in Nicole’s coffin. “But it’s a very specific job I need done, and a little birdy handed me _your_ business card specially for it. It’s going to require your _particular_ skillset that no one else can provide.”

Nicole knew what she meant, but she wanted to hear this woman say it—admit exactly what she thought Nicole could or couldn’t do. “My ‘skillset’?” Her voice was barely more than a whisper in the darkness as anger clawed up her throat, begging to be let loose on this intruder, this predator.

The woman picked up a black file folder from the side table and opened it over her lap. Nicole couldn’t read the label in such low lighting, but that didn’t matter. The woman read it out loud for her. “’ _Haught-comma-Nicole Marie. Born January 5, 1991, at Etobicoke General Hospital. Registered May 17, 1995. Extra-Sensory Perception, Type IIIa_ ’—that’s the code we give to Seers like you. The ones who can’t See the future or the past, but they can See into people’s minds.” She stopped briefly. “Four years old, that’s awfully young to be Registered. Most Seers usually aren’t Registered until they’re ten or eleven.”

“Call me an overachiever,” Nicole bit back.

“Seers grow into their gifts—kind of like growing into big ears, I guess. I wonder, have you _always_ been able to See the way you can?” The woman asked.

_Yes._

“No,” she said.

The woman _tsk_ ed. “Lying is unbecoming, Nicole. Didn’t your Momma teach you better than that?”

A knife twisted in Nicole’s gut. The woman smiled again, like she knew what she was doing to Nicole—like she knew the anger and guilt and sadness she was bringing up into Nicole’s consciousness. She knew what she was doing to Nicole’s heart.

_Enough games._

“Just tell me who you need me to find,” Nicole warned. “And then get the _hell_ out of my apartment.”

The woman shut Nicole’s file and switched it for another folder— _Did she bring an entire fucking filing cabinet with her, too?_ Nicole thought irately.

This new file, the woman passed to Nicole.

Nicole flipped it open to find a dossier.

The first page held an overview of the mark, with what looked like an ID photo paperclipped to the top left corner of the page. The man in the photo was looking at the camera severely, his jaw set in a hard line. His head was shaved close, and smooth dark skin showed no emotion at all. His face was blank, serious, his expression giving nothing away. Nicole flipped the photo up to read the overview. “’ _Dolls-Comma-Xavier_ ’,” she read aloud. “Who is this, jilted ex-boyfriend?”

She highly doubted that’s what it was—after all, who in the world would send a bounty hunter after an ex with a _dossier_ on them? Who would even _have_ a dossier for their ex?

Well, women who break into a bounty hunter’s apartment and threaten them and their loved ones with violence and death, maybe. But that was beside the point.

Nicole would be lying if she said she’d _never_ taken freelance work before, to find someone’s ex who had cut and skipped town with their dog or their life’s savings or what have you. That was the economy these days. Plus, Nicole had a bit of a soft spot for hurt lovers. It was a weakness.

In all those cases, she’d never been given a _dossier_ to find someone. Usually some Instagram posts, or maybe a Facebook profile link to follow. Once, she’d just been given a drunken, tear-filled story of love and heartbreak from a woman she had just met in the ladies’ room of a grimy dive bar in Winnipeg. The woman had told it to her as she puked, and Nicole held her hair back. The woman had no money to pay, but her boyfriend had stolen her grandmother’s irreplaceable necklace and ran off with her best friend. Nicole didn’t need payment. All she’d accept as thanks was the woman’s Stetson, when Nicole showed up three days later with the necklace and a photo on her phone of the ex with a black eye.

She still thought fondly of Alana, sometimes, when she wore the Stetson. Holding someone’s hair back for them as they puke in a bar bathroom bonds for life, after all.

The woman in the armchair snorted, pulling Nicole out of her reverie. “Who he is or is not to me does not concern you,” she said, but her voice was tight. “Your job is to find him and keep tabs on him. Report back to me on what you find.”

Nicole shut the file. “So I’m going to be your spy.” It wasn’t a question, but—for once—she got an answer, anyway.

“For now,” the woman appeased. “You’ll be given further instruction when I’m satisfied.”

 _So I’m going to be your grunt worker, too._ All she needed was a mask and a black toque, and she’d be the nameless minion of a cheesy Batman villain.

Nicole took a moment before answering, to consider her options.

Option 1: Don’t accept the job, tell the woman in the shadows to fuck off.

Possible Outcomes: 

  1. The woman goes after her Nan Ava, perhaps the only meaningful family Nicole had left. 
  2. The woman makes sure Nicole herself ends up dead in a ditch somewhere, no teeth or fingerprints with which to identify her body. 



Option 2: Accept the job. 

Possible Outcomes: 

  1. Possibly definitely 100% commit one or more serious felonies, including felony stalking, and thereby risking serious imprisonment. 
  2. Aide and abet someone else's criminality for  _God_ only knew what nefarious purpose this woman had, and thereby risking serious imprisonment for not only being a criminal, but also being a criminal _for hire_. Her Momma taught her better than that. 



She was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, it seemed.

She let out a defeated sigh, closing the dossier. The fight had left her, and her shoulders slumped. “Where do I find him?”

The woman in the chair smiled, a self-satisfied smile that made Nicole want to carve it from her face with her bare hands. “In a small town near the American border. Your file says you’re already acquainted with it, actually. Purgatory. Ring any bells?”

Too many bells, in fact.

“I’ve heard of it, yeah,”

“You have three days to relocate. After that, I’ll be in touch with further instructions. Clear?”

“Absolutely transparent,” Nicole said in a tired voice that was sounding more and more hollow, even to her own ears. “Can you get out of my apartment now?”

The woman stood and brushed dust off her blouse that wasn’t there. She still looked as perfect and pristine as ever. “It has been lovely meeting with you, Nicole Haught. I look forward to working with you.”

Nicole stood after her, biting back several words that would make her grandmother immensely disappointed in her for even knowing. “Hey, you never gave me your name.” She said after the woman who was heading to her door.

The woman paused for a moment before she turned back to Nicole with a sly smile on her face. “No,” she said. “No I didn’t.”

And then she was gone, and Nicole was left alone in her living room. Blood was still seeping through the stitch she had popped in her palm, but there was no time to go back to the ER tonight. Tiredness seeped into her muscles, her bones. It threatened to drag her down, pull her under into sleep that she so desperately craved, but she refused.

She shook her head of cobwebs and flicked on the light in the kitchen. Set the coffeemaker, grabbed the first aide kit from the cupboard, and sat down at the table with her laptop.

Three days.

The timeline rattled around in her head like a bird loose from its cage.

It felt like another person’s memories that knew the way to the Ghost River Triangle—another person’s memories that knew the stories of Purgatory and the ungodly horrors that followed the town’s denizens like plagues. They were cautionary tales, really. Ghost stories to scare little kiddies into staying in their beds at night.

And yet.

Nicole was a ghost story, too. At least in part.

All ghost stories were true. At least in part.

She pushed past those parts of her mind: The parts that had been tucked into bed with _once upon a time_ s of gunslingers and demons and curses alike. She put those to bed, for now. It did not do well to dwell upon the past.

Wrapping her hand in more gauze than the ER nurse already had, she worked until the sun rose.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started posting this on my tumblr, @astrophysical-bean, but I wasn't *totally* happy with it, so I decided to re-work it a bit and post it here instead. Let me know what you think of it? Any good? Completely horrible?


	2. Fate's Machine Washable Plan

“ _You sure you’re okay, Nana?_ ”

“ _Of course I am,_ lasair _. Why, did you See something?_ ”

“ _No, no, it’s just… it’s just one of those feelings again. It’s bad this time, Nana. I was just worried. Wanted to make sure you were all right._ ”

“ _I’m fine, I promise. Always am. Not even the mailman can sneak up on me—and I swear on my great-grandmother’s pearl necklace he’s trying to. Just the other day—_ ”

“ _He was trying to jimmy the door open again while you were at bingo night, right?_ ”

“ _He was! And I swear, Canada Post just ignores_ all _my letters of complaint about him! —My point is,_ lasair _, is that I have a_ feeling _about the mail-devil. Just like you have a_ feeling _about something ahead. Don’t ignore it, Nicole. You know you can’t._ ”

“ _I know, Nana. I won’t._ ”

“ _Are_ you _okay? You sound stressed._ ”

“ _I’m fine, Nana. Just caught up in work, is all. I just wanted to check in._ ”

“ _I’m glad you did,_ lasair _. You never call anymore. I miss my favourite granddaughter._ ”

“ _I miss you, too._ ”

“ _When are you going to come visit?_ ”

“ _I’ll try to come see you soon. I love you, Nana._ ”

“ _I love you too,_ lasair beag.”

Nicole shook her head, trying to rid her mind of the phone call from the night before, as she merged into the passing lane on the 2-South somewhere north of Edmonton. The sun had barely begun to rise over the horizon to her left, and yet already the highway was clogged with commuters on their way to work in the city. She swore colourfully out the window as a suited man in a compact silver Mazda tried to cut her off, flipping him off as she sped by.

Okay, so it probably wasn’t _entirely_ fair of her to be swearing at him so vividly, but she let it slide in her conscience. It wasn’t even 7 a.m., the coffee she had picked up from a gas station in Athabasca had been burnt beyond recognition of coffee, and she was on the road back to the Ghost River Triangle. She had earned the right to be a little cranky this morning.

Scowling at the crammed road ahead of her, she rubbed angrily at the tattoo on her shoulder.

In another life, rubbing at it would have been a nervous habit that her Momma would have scolded her for.

In another life.

_Don’t go there, Nic. Don’t._

“I must be losing my _fucking_ mind,” she muttered to no one at all. She was alone in her car, as usual. The only thing to keep her company was the radio, and the other drivers on the road—

“ _Learn how to fucking drive, you inbred hick!_ ” She hollered out the window as the man in the silver Mazda shot in front of her, forcing her to slam on her breaks at the last second before they collided.

The man honked indignantly at that, and traffic carried on.

“Well,” Nicole muttered to herself, fidgeting with the dial on the car radio, trying to find a clearer station. “Still not as bad as the motherfucking 401. …And I’m talking to myself now. Great. Perfect.”

She was much too tired to care that she probably looked like a degenerate: hair greasy and pulled up into a messy ponytail (that wasn’t really much of a ponytail at all, since most of her hair wasn’t long enough and so it was just the top parts that were tied back while the bottom layers sat curling and unkempt at the nape of her neck); bags under her eyes darker than the coffee stains on her UofT Department of Chemistry shirt; old faded blue jeans ripped and stained with mud and grass and food.

She had barely slept at all, over the past three days since the woman with the wolf-like Under Face had broken into her apartment, given her a new job.

She had tried to sleep, really, she had. There was nothing more she wanted than to just lie down in bed and never get out. But then there would be a branch scratching on her window, or she would hear a neighbour’s shuffling feet outside her door, and she would freeze, heart racing, wondering if the woman had come back again. It was maddening.

So she had settled for saying _fuck it_ , foregoing sleep as long as it would evade her, and working instead. There had been a lot to do, before today. She had had to find a place to stay—a voice whispered in the back of her mind: _You could have gone to the Baile_ , but she shushed it promptly. She had also pored so deeply over every detail of the dossier the woman had given her that she could probably recite every word of it from memory by now. She had tried to look him up online, the man she was supposed to be tailing, but there was nothing—not even on the RCMP records database she may or may not have had somewhat-less-than-legal access to. She almost didn’t believe this man even existed at all.

The possibility that he didn’t—that the woman who hired her was just some psychopath who had concocted a wildly elaborate scheme to lure Nicole into the Ghost River Triangle to kill her violently, gruesomely, perhaps over the span of a few days—had crossed her mind several times over the past three days.

She tried not to think about it too much.

Instead, she turned up the radio and tried to lose herself in the peppy beat of the Top 40s hit playing on the local station.

But there was some mental chatter that even a new Taylor Swift single couldn’t drown away.

For hours, Nicole drove past farmlands and through small towns, past mountain views and rocky terrains, and still there was The Thing that followed her: That _feeling_ that tugged at her gut, made the tattoo prickle on her shoulder, trying to pull her in some direction she couldn’t understand. She wished she could give it a compass, tell it to point and she would drive until she found it was trying to tell her.

But she had long since given up any hope to ever be able to tell what these _feelings_ meant.

She knew what it _meant_ , of course: It was the feeling of the sands of time; the tides of change and the change of the tides. The change of the times. It was a warning, a flashing light in her periphery telling her that Something Was Coming.

She gripped the steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles blanched. “Go bother someone else, please,” she begged the _feeling_ idly, though she knew it wouldn’t listen. It never listened. Not to her, anyway. “Leave me alone, just this once.”

Nicole had never been a particularly gifted Seer by anyone’s standard. She was only a Type IIIa Seer: She could get into someone’s mind, but she couldn’t choose what she Saw. She could read the narrative there, but she couldn’t give it any direction.

It was frustrating, and tiresome, and she tried not to think about it.

There were a lot of things she made an effort not to think about, and it all wore her to the bone sometimes.

She turned the radio up louder. 

* * *

Nicole passed through Calgary around 10 a.m., making only a brief stop at a gas station just outside the city to break for the bathroom and get another cup of coffee (probably an entirely counterproductive endeavour, but she was so tired she wasn’t sure she would care if her bladder burst before she got to Purgatory).

Just past Calgary was the turnoff from the highway onto a nondescript dirt sideroad which wasn’t even labelled on most maps and which was the only road into or out of the Ghost River Triangle. She couldn’t remember if this road had any official name on any provincial surveys, or if it was just one of those paths that the locals had created themselves by driving it too many times. Either way, it felt like fate that “ _Highway to Hell_ ’ came on the oldies station just as she turned onto the road.

She couldn’t help but chuckle at that.

It was forty-five minutes of driving through the barren Badlands before she saw the first homesteads that made up the shambles of the Big City. Turning right on the Regional Road 94 would take her toward the Big City, and her Nan Ava on the other side of it. Instead, she turned left toward the town she had only ever visited a handful of times in her life, and never with her Nana’s permission—in fact, her Nana had told her very explicitly to never, ever visit Purgatory in her life, if she could help it.

But, well, Nicole had been a bored teenager with a crush on the bartender at the Devil’s Cards, a bar amidst the homesteads on the outskirts of the town that was known for not checking IDs too closely. She _hadn’t_ been able to help it.

Driving past the very same rundown old bar now, she slowed the speed of her car just enough that she could look at it a moment longer. Watching it out the driver’s side widow, she took in every detail of it that suddenly seemed so foreign to her, as if she was seeing it for the first time.

The memories of that summer flashed in her mind, bright and present and happy.

She had been 17 (though her fake ID said she was 18, and she could almost pass for it, too, if she stood up tall and wore her hair down). Back then, the Devil’s Cards had been a bright, lively place, where music had mixed with laughter and the porchlights had glowed like the fireflies that danced around them in the dark. It had been the only bright spot for miles around, a mooring station in the middle of a deep, dark sea. Nicole remembered it all in an amalgam of seductive reds and shimmering golds and mysterious blues. The smell of stale beer and cheap nachos and rose perfume bled into her mind like they filled the car. The bartender, Felicity, had been 18 (actually 18, as her real ID said, and she looked it, too) and she had had the most fantastical, chimerical, otherworldly smile Nicole had ever seen. She’d had a low, gravelly voice that made it sound like her words were for Nicole’s ears only. Nicole had gone there nearly every night she could sneak out of the Baile, her Nana’s house, and steal her Uncle Jacob’s old pickup, just so that she could soak up every seductive moment of Felicity’s attention that she could get.  

It wasn’t until one night in late July that she pinned Nicole against the side wall of the bar with white hot kisses that scorched Nicole’s skin and left bloodred lipstick smeared along her neck in long trails of fire that disappeared _far_ beneath the collar of her shirt. Nicole had sighed in rapture, begged for more— _ached_ for more—moaned for it to never stop. After that, she was there every night, no matter how great the risk of sneaking out of her Nana’s house. Some nights, she wouldn’t return until nearly sunrise, bruises intimately staining her skin and a dopey, drunken, blissful smile on her face.

Both of which had been impossible to explain away when her Nana (perhaps inevitably) caught her sneaking back in through her bedroom window one morning, wearing Felicity’s shirt and nothing else.

(Everything _else_ had been forgotten on the floor beside Felicity’s bed, when Nicole realized she had overslept and wouldn’t be able to get back to the Baile before sunrise).

Nicole had been grounded for the rest of the summer, but she never regretted a single moment.

She wouldn’t have recognized that same building, now, even as she looked at it. The bar she drove past now looked gaunter, hollower, as if it had been gutted of all the life she remembered it having all those years ago. It looked dirty, now. One of its front windows was boarded up with plywood, and beneath that glass was still sprinkled on the front porch, where it had showered when it was broken. A myriad of graffiti tags marred the very same side wall Felicity had pinned her against and they had stayed for hours while the stars had seemed to dance just for them.

This place now looked like the sort of place one might go if they were forgotten about. If they were alone and unloved and dirty and sad. There was no more life or love, or laughter left in it. That had all been sucked out of it long ago, it seemed.

Nicole shook her head of the memories and kept driving.

That had been the last summer she spent in the Ghost River Triangle. Bitterly, she muttered to herself, “At least I went out with a _bang_.”

It took another fifteen minutes before she officially crossed Purgatory’s town line, which was denoted only by a sign along the side of the road that looked like it had been designed sometime in the 70s and not even repainted since. Bright lettering read: “ _Welcome to Purgatory!_ ” that looked like it was spattered with something that might have been red paint, but Nicole didn’t look at too closely as she passed.

Ten minutes after that and the town was suddenly upon her. It seemed to only consist of a few streets of mom-and-pop stores; an area that one might call a suburb, if one had never actually seen a suburb before but had at least read the definition of it in a French-to-English dictionary; a Sheriff’s station; a bar; and a single low-rise apartment building. Nicole headed for the apartments.

* * *

“Now, the door has a bit of a tendency to stick during the summer months,” Mrs. Florence Weatherby was telling Nicole as she unlocked the front door of the fourth-floor walk-up. She had to throw a bit of her shoulder into it as she pushed the door open, and the hinges creaked in protest—it had been a while since someone had rented this unit. There wasn’t a whole lot of turnover for tenants, in Purgatory. “But that should stop once the weather cools down a bit in September—how long did you say you were staying?”

Nicole stepped into the apartment, after her new landlady. “I didn’t say, actually.”

She looked around.

The apartment was a bit smaller than the one she’d had in Asherton, but that didn’t bother Nicole at all. She didn’t take up much space—she didn’t have much of a life to take up space _with_ , really. Just a couple suitcases full of clothes, toiletries, and other necessities; an armful of books to pass the time on stakeouts; a box of enough kitchen utensils for only one person; and the old Stetson that currently sat atop her head like an old friend.

The living room seemed to be an entirely blue affair—the walls were a light, powdery blue; the couch and armchair were a darker azure; and the decorative plates on the walls were accented with a royal blue that spoke of the plates themselves being worth a lot of money. Nicole made a mental note to take them down, in case she broke them by accident.

The kitchen was open to the living room and had creamy laminate countertops and matching cabinet doors. A small hallway led down to the single bedroom and bathroom.

It wasn’t a whole lot, and it kind of smelled like mothballs, but Nicole dropped her suitcases on the floor gratefully, anyway, and smiled at Mrs. Weatherby. “My job kind of takes me all over the place without a lot of notice. I hope that won’t be a problem?”

Mrs Weatherby smiled at her warmly, maternally. It made Nicole’s heart clench. “Of course not, dear. We’ll be happy to have you here as long as you want to stay.”

Nicole nodded earnestly, honestly believing the woman.

A crash in the kitchen made Nicole jump, but Mrs. Weatherby didn’t seem phased. She just huffed angrily and marched into the other room with purpose. “That’ll just be the cat, dear— _Get! I told you get!_ ” She waved angry, shooing hands in the air.

Nicole followed her curiously. On the floor of the kitchen, amid a planter of flowers that had been knocked from the windowsill, sat an angry-looking tabby cat. Nicole looked at the cat, confused. The cat flicked its tail at her impatiently. “The cat?” Nicole asked.

“She’s just a stray,” Mrs. Weatherby explained as she tried to shoo the cat away once more. The cat was unaffected by her efforts. “I don’t know _how_ she keeps managing to get the window to the fire escape open, but no matter how many times I kick her out, she just keeps getting in. I’ll try and see if I can’t get someone to come by tomorrow, put a better lock on that window for you.”

“That’d be great, thanks,” Nicole said, eyeing the cat warily. The cat looked at her with intelligent eyes, as if daring Nicole to try to kick her out of _her_ home. Nicole just glared back in return.

“Oh and _look_ at the mess you’ve made!” Mrs. Weatherby chided the cat, nudging her gently with a toe.

“I can clean it up, ma’am,” Nicole said.

“Call me Flo, dear. ‘ _Ma’am_ ’ makes me feel too old for my bones.” Mrs. Weatherby— _Flo_ —said in a mischievous voice that sounded almost like Nan Ava’s. Nicole’s throat tightened.

“Flo,” she nodded. “If you don’t mind, I’d really just like to take a shower? It was a long trip here.”

Flo looked at her, annoyance at the cat melting away into a happy, sympathetic grin. “Of course, you poor thing. You look absolutely exhausted.” _You really have no idea_ , Nicole wanted to say, but she held her tongue. “Here, I’ll just get you your keys and be out of your hair.”

The old woman fished a key ring out of the pocket of her tatty old woolen cardigan and handed it to Nicole. “There, there’s the front door, the garage, and the mailbox,” she pointed out each key in turn. “Now you get your rest, dear.” Flo gave Nicole a comforting squeeze of the shoulder, and Nicole tried to ignore the warmth that spread beneath fingertips that weren’t trying to hurt her.

It had been a long time since she’d felt that.

She swallowed that and pocketed the keys. “Thank you so much, ma’am, I really do appreciate you giving me a spot on such short notice.”

“It’s no problem, dear. We’re happy to have you.” She gave Nicole an achingly familiar smile, and Nicole was nearly overcome by the sudden need to sink into this woman’s arms, in a hug that would surround her, protect her, make her feel wanted and safe. “Welcome home.”

Nicole waited until the landlady was out of her apartment to let the tears brim up in her eyes. She looked wanly on the cat that still sat in a mess of dirt and upturned wildflowers beneath the window in her new kitchen. The cat looked back at her in challenge.

She sighed. “Will you at least move so I can clean up the mess you made?”

* * *

Nicole wasn’t sure where she was. It didn’t look like anywhere in particular, really.

It didn’t look like anywhere at all.

She looked around her, trying to find identifiable markers. As she looked, her surroundings seemed to bleed into more focus, like ink dripping into water that dripped into a scenery. Trees took form all around her, dark and towering and foreboding, silvery pines with needles that looked much too sharp to be natural. Grass curled and grew wild beneath her bare feet. Acorns showered from the sky and landed themselves in artful arrangements on the ground. Mist curled up from the ground like claws closing around prey, hanging in a low fog around her ankles. A chilling air bit into the skin of her arms, bare to the elements in her thin t-shirt—a UofT Department of Criminology t-shirt that still had her name written on the back in Sharpie, from Frosh Week. It was cold, here. Her breaths curled into thick wisps in front of her nose, milky white and almost opaque. The smallest shafts of sunlight that did manage to get through the thick canopy of pines above her were muted, grey and stale.

She was in a forest, and she was so, so alone.

“Hello?” she called into the stillness, and her own voice echoed back at her. There was nothing else: no birds tweeted in the distance, nor any chipmunks chattered in the trees. It didn’t seem like there was anything else alive in this forest, besides her.

She suddenly felt so small. She shrank back at the trees that seemed to be growing larger, gradually. It felt like they were slowly beginning to encroach on her, trying to push her away. Trying to suffocate her.

A twig snapped somewhere behind her.

She whirled on the sound, heart pounding, but there was nothing.

Another twig snapped, to her left. Feet crunched over pinecones. Branches rustled and snapped. Someone was approaching.

She turned, and her breath hitched in her throat, blood freezing to ice in her veins. “Momma?”  

Madeline fixed her with a cold, unblinking stare. Eyes crystal blue, clear as the sky.

Water dripped in a silent stream from the hem of her sopping wet dress, the one that was a happy shade of blue to match her eyes and had little white polka dots on it. The one she had died in.

Nicole had bought her that dress, for her birthday one year. She crashed her car into a river only a few months later.

Her mother’s hair—the same colour as Nicole’s, red like rays from a setting sun curving over the horizon—hung in lifeless, knotted tendrils about her shoulders, matted with leaves and twigs from the river they had fished her out of. Cold radiated off her in waves, and frost began to leech at the grass beneath her toes. She shuffled toward Nicole, more falling from one foot to the other rather than stepping. Her skin was so, so pale. Almost translucent. Almost grey. Almost decaying.

Nicole choked a sob back in her throat.

“Have you found her yet?” Her mother asked in a voice that wasn’t spoken out loud, but rather it echoed in Nicole’s mind, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Her lips hadn’t moved. Coldness crept up Nicole’s spine as if it were fingers of ice, counting vertebrae one by one.

“Who?” She asked, her voice small—so small, so broken. Like the voice of a scared little girl who just wanted her Momma.

Her mother quirked her head to the side, like she used to do when she caught Nicole in a lie. “You haven’t.”

Nicole felt like she was a child again. A scared little girl who needed protection from the monsters under her bed. “Who am I supposed to find, Momma?”

Her mother ignored her questions. She was now only a couple steps away from Nicole, and Nicole could feel the coldness flowing from her skin like a shower of icicles in the wind. She stopped her shuffling, stood still. So still. Deathly still. “I’m not supposed to be here. But I had to warn you. Find her, baby girl. You have to find her.”

Nicole reached out, blindly, ignoring the feeling of dread that settled into her bones the longer she looked at her mother, but Madeline pulled away. “Momma,” she choked. “Momma please—”

“I can’t stay long, baby girl.” It was her mother standing in front of her, but there was no warmth left in her voice. It was empty and ashen, like a cold hearth. “Can you find her? They’re coming, Nicole. It’s time to find her. That’s the only way you’re all going to survive what’s coming.”

Nicole felt lost, more lost than she could ever remember being. “I don’t know who you mean—Momma _please_ —”

“You shouldn’t have come back, Nicole.” The trees seemed to be getting closer and closer. They would run out of room, soon. “The Ghost River Triangle is a dangerous place. The dead don’t rest easy here.”

“I didn’t have a choice—”

“I know,” and that was the first time it seemed like her mother had actually heard her—like she wasn’t just an empty husk, reading out a script some twisted sycophant had programmed into her. Her face was still devoid of emotion, of movement. But there was something in the voice that echoed in Nicole’s mind. It was almost like warmth, or maybe like caring. It wasn’t _quite_ , but it was _almost_. It was _almost_ like the voice that had sung her to sleep when she had nightmares. It was _almost_ like the voice that had cooed in her ear when she was young and crying over her first broken heart. It was _almost_ like the voice that had told her a long time ago that everything would be okay and that she had believed because the voice was her mother’s, and she would have believed anything her mother told her, if it was promising a happy ending. “I know you didn’t get a choice in this, baby girl. Fate doesn’t ever give us a choice.”

“Not between the devil and the deep blue sea.” Nicole finished, hot tears spilling down her cheeks now. Her mother’s eyes followed them in their tracks, down to her chin, down to the ground.

“I can find her for you. She’s close. She’s in the Triangle.”

“Who, Momma?” Nicole felt like she was being cored like an apple, turned inside out.

Madeline pressed a cold palm to the center of Nicole’s chest, and a pulse of ice shot through her. The wind ran from her lungs. Every nerve in her body fired at once. She could feel it all, every fiber, every cell of her entire being, as they all screamed out at once, and then she felt so empty, all of a sudden. So incomplete. So _cold_.

Her mother leaned in, looked deep into her daughter’s eyes. Nicole tried not to flinch at the fact that there was nothing to see Underneath. As a child, her mother had looked like a glowing hearth. A fire that burned to bright, warm embers. A home fire that would never stop burning.

But now there was nothing. The fireplace had gone cold. There was no spirit left to See in her.

Somehow, that was more jarring than the blood caked underneath her fingernails.

“I love you, baby girl,” she said, her voice growing smaller in Nicole’s mind. She was slipping away. Nicole tried to reach out, to grab on tighter, to _never let go again_.

But her mother gave her a push in the chest, just above her heart, and then everything was gone in a coil of smoke. 

* * *

Empty.

Scratched and broken and cracking from the inside out.

A massive headache.

Nicole groaned, grinding a hand into her eye, feeling like she needed to press her brain back into place.

Something sticky and cool pressed flat against her cheek.

It smelled like beer.

A tabletop.

Laminated wood.

Nicole peeled her eyes open, wiping away the crust of tears along her lids.

She had been crying?

She had ben crying.

She was slumped over, face laying on the tabletop of a booth. She was in a restaurant, of sorts—no, that wasn’t right. She looked around. She was in a bar. How had she gotten here? Wasn’t she just at her apartment? She tried to walk backward in her mind.

She had cleaned up the mess that stray cat had made in her kitchen, and then gone to take a shower. She had washed the long drive off her. Then she had sat down on her bed to get dressed. She must have fallen asleep then. She must have been so tired that she didn’t even notice falling asleep.

A cold rush ran through her, as a terrifying thought occurred to her. She looked down—a breath of relief. She was dressed, at least.

In fact.

She was dressed better than she had been in a long time.

Nice jeans. A crisply ironed button up with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, that a happy shade of blue to match her Momma’s eyes and had little white polka dots on it.

Had… had fate dressed her up nicely and walked her over to a bar?

_Find her._

She looked around at the bar. The sunlight had streamed in through the dirty windows wasn’t very slanted just yet—it was still only midday, or thereabouts.

(How had she gotten here? Had she walked? Or just kind of… _poof_ ed?)

She noted that the place was more of a pub or a dive bar than anything else. It was all dirty wooden interiors, and the booths that lined the walls had cracked polyester cushioning, stuffing popping out of the seams and peeling away in the shape of countless ass-prints from over the decades. Two pool tables sat in the main area, both unoccupied.

Down a small set of stairs was more seating—tables now, all of which sat empty, waiting to be filled once more people got off work for the day. (The entire bar was empty, it seemed. It was probably before open hours). The tables were all centered around the bar, which sat in the middle of the lower area, a square structure with a single bartender in the middle of it. The bartender didn’t appear to have even noticed Nicole was there. They—she, it was definitely a _she_ , by the sound of the high, appealing voice that was singing softly under breath—stood behind the bar counter, wiping glasses, preparing for open time.

Something in her periphery glowed.

A warning.

_Find her_.

The glowing felt like what her mother had looked like Underneath.

She followed it.

Her feet walked of their own accord, carrying her where they wanted her to go—she tried not to think about how this had never happened before: This was a _feeling_ and it was actually _telling_ her where to go.

_Find her_.

She wasn’t sure what was about to Happen. She only hoped that the Universe did.

Well, the Universe did, in a way, if you didn't look at its plan very closely, and through squinted eyes, tilting your head just slightly to the left—if you looked at things like that, and took what you saw with several very, very large grains of salt, then yes, you would see that the Universe did, in fact, know what it was doing with its plan on occasion.

Halfway down the small staircase, a pipe burst from somewhere inside the bar counter. Nicole heard glasses crashing to the ground and a high-pitched squeal, followed by a long string of curse words that could have made paint peel. Nicole paused, but the _feeling_ pushed her forward again.

Behind the bar, a short woman was fighting with a broken tap, beer spraying everywhere as she flailed madly against its onslaught, trying to turn it off. The stream was strong, though, and it was directed right up her nose—she choked and sputtered, spitting everywhere. Nicole forgot all about the _feeling_ in her stomach, for a moment, as she jumped the last steps and all but lunged across the bar, pulling the broken tap closed with both hands, trying to contain the stream. Beer still fizzed between her fingertips— _fuck, I’m going to have to get someone to look at this cut on my hand_ again—but it had stopped spraying the bartender directly.

The bartender blinked, stunned. Dripping wet.

She looked from the tap to the woman still struggling to hold it in place.

The light in Nicole’s periphery flashed once, a bright pulse that could have been a shooting star in the middle of the day, as if it was saying, _Yes, this is good, you did good._ And then it was gone, and Nicole was left with a soft smile on her face.

“Hi,” she said. Tried not to stare. Told herself not to look in this woman’s eyes— _Don’t look, don’t look, don’t you dare look at her face_ —and instead focused on everything else about her. Her slim nose and sharp jaw that looked like they had been thought up by an artist, or like perhaps Archimedes himself had calculated their angles. Her lips that were soft and pink and curved into the barest hint of a shocked smile that made Nicole’s heart skip a beat. Her soft brown hair that was swept carefully over delicate shoulders that looked like they might _just_ fit underneath Nicole’s hands perfectly. Her low-cut tank top that was now soaked with beer much too cheap for someone like her, clinging to her curves so intimately it made Nicole swallow.

(The little butterflies printed on it matched the ones in Nicole’s stomach).

Okay, so maybe she had failed to not stare.

The bartender stared back, confusion pulling her brows into a small question. Beer dripped from her everything. “Hi,” she said in a breath.

“Um,” Nicole started, awkward, suddenly cursing that flashing light in the corner of her eye that had disappeared when she could have used help from _anything_ , right then—what a fucking useless wingman fate was, apparently. “Do—do you need help?”

Which was a stupid question, really, considering the fact that Nicole was the one barely containing the beer in the tap, struggling with both hands as the stream threatened to break back out beneath her fingers. The bartender was only regarding her in confusion.

She blinked again, as if suddenly falling back into her mind, and then remembered herself. “Oh— _fuck me blind_ , I’m soaking wet. I’m so sorry,”

“No need to apologize, but I usually like to buy a girl dinner first before hearing that.” Nicole quipped before her brain could tell her to not be a dumbass.

The bartender gaped, flushing bright red, eyes nearly bulging out of her head. Nicole worried she might have a stroke. She dropped behind the bar counter, faster than a blink, and started rummaging around for something. Nicole strained over the counter—she was leaning far across it, her stomach lying flat in a pool of sticky beer—but she still couldn’t see what the bartender was looking for. “I _told_ Doc to get that tap fixed _weeks_ ago, it’s been rusting for months.” The bartender said, moving past Nicole’s joke swiftly. “And now… _aha!_ ”

She popped back up, holding up a roll of duct tape in triumph. The victorious smile on her face could have lit up a small town. “Just keep holding it for a minute? Just like…” She twisted around the taps, looking for the best angle. Nicole lifted a couple fingers carefully, trying to give her an opening to the break in the pipe without spraying her again. “Perfect! Just like that, thank you so much.” She pulled herself up to sit on the edge of the counter, slouching down to get at the pipe.

“It’s no problem. I’m Nicole, by the way. Nicole Haught,”

The bartender snorted and bit off a piece of duct tape. She peeked up at Nicole curiously. “What, was Nicole Humble-Brag taken or something?”

Even though she had heard every possible variation of joke about her last name before, she still laughed at that. It sounded different, coming from this woman who studied the pipe like she was a duct tape engineer. “ _Haught_. H-a-u-g-h-t. It’s an English name, from the 11 th century.”

The bartender nodded sagely, wrapping the first piece of tape around the pipe. “ _Ah_ , I see. So it’s _Lady_ Nicole Humble-Brag, of the Norman Conquerors, is it?”

Nicole gave her a flat look. “You’re clever, I’ll give you that,”

“How kind of you,” the bartender mused demurely. “Okay, that _should_ hold it until we can get it replaced.”

Nicole released her fingers slowly, one by one, as the bartender held her breath in anticipation of another indoor storm of Alexander Keith’s. It never came.

Nicole slid off the bar gratefully, looking down at herself as she went. Her shirt was soaked down the front. She frowned, trying not to think about how the material hung off her the same way it hung off Momma when they pulled her out of the river.

_Not now_ , she told herself. _Don’t do this now_.

The bartender noticed, too. “Oh, shit, I’m so sorry about your shirt—”

Nicole waved her off, putting it out of her mind. “It’s fine, it’ll wash.” (Maybe. Were shirts supplied by fate made machine washable?) “I’m just glad we fixed your tap. Bet that’d make happy hour a bit harder, right?” She laughed at her own joke, trying not to let the frailness of her nerves show. She cringed at how awkward and forced it sounded.

“Waverly,” the bartender said suddenly, all at once, as if she was rushing to get the word out of her mouth before she lost her courage.

Nicole blinked, mouth snapping shut. “What?”

“My name. Waverly.” She repeated, sounding smaller this time, but she held out a hand, and Nicole shook it, marvelling dimly in the back of her mind that Waverly had calluses on her palm that tickled Nicole’s skin and pulled a smile onto her face without her say-so. “Waverly Earp,”

The name sounded familiar, as if from a dream or a distant, near-insignificant memory Nicole had tucked away in her brain somewhere, but she couldn’t quite place it just yet. “It’s nice to meet you, Waverly Earp.”

It felt nice, to have this name in her mouth: It rolled around her cheeks, across her tongue, dripped from her lips like sweet, sweet strawberry juice dribbling down her chin on a hot summer day.

“Nice to meet you, too, Nicole Haught.” Waverly smiled, warm and inviting, and it made Nicole want nothing more than to dive into it—to forget the years she had spent training herself to never look someone in the eye so that she didn’t have to See them without their permission, didn’t have to invade their privacy like that.

She couldn’t exactly control whether or not she Saw someone’s Under Face—which is to say, she couldn’t control whether or not she Saw someone at all, and so she had simply learned how to control whether or not she saw them.

But this woman was _so_ tempting, and Nicole was… well, she wasn’t _curious_ , per se.

She was just…

Curious.

“Now,” Waverly said, breaking Nicole out of her reverie. “Thank you _so_ much for your help—come back later tonight and anything you want to drink, it’s on the house—but for now, I’m gonna have to kindly ask you to beat it.” She poked a thumb back over her shoulder, toward the door.

Nicole looked at her blankly, confused. “Pardon?”

Waverly whirled a finger in the air, indicating to the empty bar. “We’re still closed? Don’t open ‘till four on Mondays.”

Nicole blanched, her entire mind beginning to peel in on itself in panic. “Oh, shit, my bad, I’m so sorry.” She looked around, wracking her brain for an excuse—anything to say, to avoid the fact that she wasn’t even sure why she was there, either. “I just—your door was open, and I was wanting a cappuccino? I’m so sorry, I didn’t even notice y’all weren’t open yet.”

Waverly looked at her strangely, like Nicole had just said she’d had a somewhat vaguely prophetic dream wherein her dead mother had warned her about _something_ and told her she needed to find _someone_ or else _not all of us are going to survive_ the _something_ that’s coming, and then she had woken up here, dressed up nicely for what apparently was a meet cute preordained, either by the stars or by her dead mother. 

“You… didn’t notice we weren’t open?” Waverly repeated, slowly, spacing out her words for emphasis. Nicole nodded. “You didn’t notice the _Closed_ sign on the door? Or the fact that there’s no one else here?”

Nicole looked around awkwardly, blushing bright as her hair. “…No,” She said. “No I… I guess I didn’t. Silly me.” She fixed her eyes on Waverly again, feeling for any leftover dregs of courage she might have stored away inside herself. If the stars wanted her to meet Waverly, then who was she to disappoint them? “I just… I saw you in here and I didn’t notice anything else.”

Waverly ducked her head, blushing. “Well.” She cleared her throat, looking up at Nicole nervously. “You’re still gonna have to come back later for that cappuccino.”

Nicole chuckled. “Right. Opens at four, you said?” Waverly nodded. Nicole rapped a nervous knuckle on the counter, letting a smile lift at her lips that for a moment made her feel so, so light. “Can’t wait. See you later, alligator.”

She kept her eyes forward as she left, willing herself to not look back—had she looked back, she might have noticed Waverly’s eyes trailing after her, or the conspiratorial smile that pulled at the corners of her lips as she tested the new name on her lips, quietly, just for herself in the empty bar. “ _Haught._ Of course.”

* * *

“ _…I’m tellin’ ya, Petey, somethin’ ain’t right happ’nin’ in that back room they’ve taken over in the Station_.”

“ _’S not our business to worry about that, Mac. I’m sure whatever they got goin’ on back there, Dolls knows what’s what._ ”

“ _Bull_ shit _on that, didja see the job they did on the McCready murder last year? Fuckin’ ridiculous. Case went cold in a month. Didn’t even interview the wife—_ ”

“ _You keep your voice_ down _when you talk like that in here, God damn it. Gus McCready is a fine woman and you know_ damn well _she didn’t kill her husband, ya hear? Whatever they investigated in that case, I’m sure it was a hell of a lot more plausible than_ Gus _did it._ ”

“ _Yeah, yeah, I hear ya. ‘S just not right, Pete. Dolls walkin’ in like he owns the God damn place, takin’ over_ my _Station, tellin’_ me _what I can and cannot investigate like I’m his_ bitch—”

She sat in a corner booth of the bar, feet up on seat, arm slung over the back of the broken polyester upholstery, Stetson pulled down low over her eyes. No one took much notice of her in the bar— _Shorty’s_ , she’d learned earlier from the dusty old sign that hung outside, above the door—she was just another face in the crowd, to most. To the two Sheriff’s deputies she was listening to, as they picked up dinner to-go for their graveyard shifts at work. They were arguing angrily, worked up over whatever was going on in their Station with Dolls.

It was nearly 10 p.m. now, and she had been sitting in her booth for the better part of the evening, listening as people milled past, not even stopping to notice her. She looked like one of them, see. She looked like she belonged there, had lived there her whole life: Ratty jeans that were smeared with dirt and grime, probably from a long day’s work on the farm; hand-me-down Ghost River Triangle Seniors Bingo Club t-shirt that had certainly seen better days; skin tanned from hours spent working in the sun, blistered and freckled and worked hard and tough; red hair pulled back sensibly beneath her worn out cream-coloured Stetson.

She looked like one of the locals, so most didn’t pay her any mind at all.

She had been watching them all night, all of them: The men at the booth beside her, discussing which of the women they had gone to high school with had ended up with the best rack; The man sitting at the bar, trying to talk up a woman who was about five times out of his league; the women squeezed in around two tables pushed together in the center of the lower area, chittering excitedly about someone’s bridal shower coming up. She listened to them all, patiently, stoically, noting and tucking and filing away anything that they would have considered meaningless but that burned brightly in her mind as useful, irreplaceable.

The only one who seemed to pay her any mind was the woman behind the bar. She watched Nicole with quietly suppressed interest, letting her eyes wander back to the redhead in the corner of the bar only every so often. She didn’t go over there herself; she sent Rosie, the waitress on staff that night, over in her stead. It was like clockwork. Every hour or so, the woman in the booth would finish the last beer she had been nursing with the fries on her plate, and Waverly would wave Rosie over to the bar. She’d pop open another beer—a bottle of Canadian, not an Alberta craft beer—and she’d point to the woman in the booth. Rosie would give her that _look_ , that don’t-you-think-we’re-not-going-to-talk-about-this-later look, and she’d bring the beer to the woman in the booth. Nicole would take the beer, give Rosie a warm, glowing smile, and then she’d look to Waverly. They’d lock eyes, just for a moment, and Waverly would see Nicole’s expression change, just slightly. Her face would relax, and the hardness that usually stained those soft brown eyes would melt away, like she was watching a sun rise.

They’d smile, both of them, and Waverly would go back to work, and the whole cycle would repeat itself again an hour later.

Waverly tried not to wonder about this woman who seemed to be doing nothing in her booth except idly picking on the fries she had left over from the dinner she had ordered around 6, idly sipping from the beers Rosie was ferrying over. She tried to keep her mind on her work.

But it was hard not to wonder, every so often.

This woman sat, simply observing them like she was Henri Cartier-Bresson and they were the scene she was waiting to immortalize in a photo. She looked like one of them, like she blended in. But she didn’t drink an Alberta beer like them; she drank that Ontario swill that may as well have been dishwater instead. She didn’t have the chapped cheeks or burnt neck that they had from a lifetime of working on a farm. She didn’t look at Waverly like something to be conquered. She looked at Waverly like Waverly was filled with light, filled with stars shooting across a beautiful night sky, and she was making a wish that Waverly couldn’t hear.

She wasn’t one of them, that much was obvious.

She was new.

She was different.

She was a lot of things, Waverly was betting.

She just wasn’t sure what.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Oh shit Bean, what the fuck, we didn't ask for angst." But you're getting it anyway! 
> 
> The Irish used in this chapter:  
> Lasair - Flame  
> Lasair beag - Little flame  
> Baile - Home  
> (I am so sorry if any of this is translated wrong; I don't know any Irish Gaelic, and I was relying on Google to translate). 
> 
> Thank you SO much to those of you who actually took the time to read this and comment and tell me you were interested!!! I really wasn't sure anyone would be interested, but!!! Here y'all are!!! Thank you!!! Also shoutout to the person who caught the Alicia Rutherford reference in Chapter 1. I'm so glad at least one person got that. (Workin' Moms is a great show and I love Alicia so much). 
> 
> I do apologize, there will be some long-ish waits between chapters; I do have a full-time job and I only get a couple of days off every now and then. But I will do my best! Until then, follow me on tumblr @astrophysical-bean and talk to me if you want! I'm lonely. I sometimes post about updates to this, if that's an incentive? Ask me questions! Tell me your wild theories about what Nicole's mom was doing in her weird prophecy-type dream thingy! Tell me about how much you love this show! Tell me about your day! Ask me about the origin of the surname Haught, which (as I found out in a Google search for this chapter) is an actual real surname! Who knew?! I kind of just assumed Emily Andras had made it up for the pun of it. 
> 
> And yes, I'm just gonna say this now, this fic will have as many Canadian jokes as I can get in. I'm Canadian, born and bred, and just for once I get to write something that's Canadian, not American, and I'm gonna fucking enjoy it. Ask me about any and all Canada references on Tumblr. 
> 
> Happy Pride Month!


	3. The Hail Mary Squad

The woman stood at attention, back ramrod straight and arms folded behind, in a room that had no windows and only one door made of solid steel that had been bolted shut behind her the moment she had stepped through it. No lights shined, and she was blanketed in darkness, the night closing in on her like lions on the hunt.

And yet, she still felt the need to roll her eyes. She really hated all this cloak-and-dagger bullshit, if she was honest.

“Is the operative in place, Agent?” A single voice spoke all around her, reverberating off walls, echoing in her ears, tinny and without body attached to it. There was no way to know where it came from. Still, it was an authoritative voice. Commanding. Asking no questions, not really. Only demanding answers.

The woman nodded, though it was more to herself; they couldn’t see her, and she couldn’t see them. “Yes,” she said, forcing her voice to be crystal clear and unwavering. “Pythia has moved to Purgatory today, per my instructions. Contact will be made in a dead zone tomorrow, and she will be given her next directive.”

“Good.” The voice could have sounded proud, almost, if she was a woman who made a habit of kidding herself. “I don’t think I need to impress upon you the importance of Prometheus running smoothly, do I, Agent?”

The threat was there, lying dormant beneath the words. The woman felt it, like the maw of a great monster she could not see simply because it was already all around her. She was already in the jaws of the beast, and it could swallow her whole at any moment.

“No, of course not,” she assured the monster lurking in the darkness. “Prometheus will unfold smoothly as planned, you have my word.”

There was a beat of vicious silence. “You should not make promises, Agent,” the voice said, “if you may not be able to keep them.”

And that was that.

The bolt was released from the door with a loud _clang_ , and the woman was dismissed. 

* * *

Nicole was not what one would call a particularly graceful sleeper. She slept in a ball, curled around the duvet she had screwed up into her arms, holding it like another person, her face buried in it, mouth agape in a silent snore. She wore only a stained old UofT Biochemistry shirt and a pair of boxers with holes in the seat. Her hair stuck up at all angles, unkempt, and drool trailed down her cheek in a dried path to her pillow. There was no peace on her face, as she slept. Her eyes were screwed shut tightly, in a silent, frozen sob that wracked her chest as she existed in her nightmare. She clung onto the duvet as if it could protect her. As if it were a person who wasn’t there anymore, but who used to curl a soft arm around her and whisper until she woke: _Wake up, love, it’s only a dream. You’re okay. It’s only a dream._

But nightmares have a habit of existing in more than only dreams, in one way or another.

It was sometime before dawn when rough hands seized her, pulling her roughly out of the sleeping nightmare and into the waking one, dragging her out of bed onto the floor. It was all too fast for her to do anything but reel as a dark blindfold was tied over her eyes and a zip tie was pulled too tightly around her wrists, cutting into her skin as it held her arms behind her back.

Fear clawed up in her stomach, hurtling around her chest like a caged animal. She threw a kick out somewhere to the side, wildly, as the hands hauled her up. Her foot met something fleshy and strong, and she heard something _crack!_ She surged for that, but a fist collided with her stomach and she doubled over, wheezing. Hands pulled her back up by her hair, and pain screamed across her scalp. Someone leaned in, next to her ear, and something cold and metallic was dug into her back, at the base of her spine. The barrel of a gun. A male voice spoke, gruff and angry. “Try that again and I shoot you.”

Nicole didn’t try it again.

There was a hand on each of her shoulders, guiding her, but it sounded like more pairs of boots stomped around her than that.

She was led outside—she could feel the pre-dawn breeze on her skin, briefly, before she was shoved into a car. The door slammed shut, and the locks clicked into place.

She was seated on a cool metal interior, legs crossed and forced into a hunch by the arms pinned behind her back. The cold bit into her bare skin, and every turn the car took threw her to each side, knocking her every which way. More than once she was toppled over by the force of a turn, only to be forced back up by one of the guards seated around her. There was no way to tell how long they drove her around for. She tried to keep track of it all, in her head— _left, left, right, left again_ —but it felt like they were just driving in circles, trying to confuse her. They probably were, too.

Finally, after some amount of time that could have been five minutes or five hours for all Nicole knew, the car was pulled to a stop. Nicole was lifted up by the strong hands that clearly weren’t too concerned about hurting her and shoved out. She fell onto a cold concrete floor that scraped the skin off her knees where she landed. She hissed at the pinpricks of pain in her legs.

Someone lifted her up again and forced her to kneel.

“Good morning, Nicole,” a calculating voice said from somewhere around her, bouncing off every surface of the room she was held in—it sounded like a large room, from the way the voice echoed, became tinny and far-away. It was that woman: The Wolf Woman, as Nicole had taken to calling her, in her head. The one who had broken into her apartment in Asherton. The one who had given her a job.

Nicole seethed. “Oh, of _fucking_ course it’s you—can you stop breaking into my apartments? Just ask me to coffee like a normal human being?”

That earned her a crack to the back of the skull from the butt of a guard’s gun. Stars exploded in front of her eyes, and she felt blood trickle down the back of her shirt. Someone pulled her back up to her knees.

The Wolf Woman ignored her indignant quips. She simply waited a moment for the daze to pass from Nicole’s mind before she continued. “So it seems you’ve accepted my offer of employment.”

Nicole spat a mouthful of blood; she had bitten her cheek when she’d been pistol whipped. She didn’t know where the spittle landed, but she hoped it was on the Wolf Woman’s perfectly shined Jimmy Choos. “Not like you gave me much of a choice.” Exhaustion and anger bled into her voice, colouring her done. “Can you take this damn blindfold off me? Since we work together and all.”

“No,” the Wolf Woman said, sharp and quick. Angry. “The blindfold is a precaution against your… singular abilities.”

Nicole laughed, tired and delighted at the agitation she could so quickly instill in this woman. “What, you don’t want to say it in front of your minions? Don’t want them to know what they’re getting into? Don’t want them to know they kidnapped someone who can get into their minds, see the faces of the people they love most, find where they live—”

A boot kicked her in the small of the back this time, and no one picked her back up again.

“I hear you’ve officially been acquainted with Purgatory?” The Wolf Woman said, conversationally, as if Nicole wasn’t lying cheek flat against a cold, damp concrete floor, gasping for air.

Nicole coughed, wheezed. “Yep.” Even just speaking made her chest burn. “We’re well on our way to being great friends, Purgatory and me. Thinking about getting matching friendship bracelets.”

“I’m so glad to hear.”

“I even learned a bit about your ex, Dolls.” She tried to roll, twist and lift herself up onto her knees. It was awkward, but she managed it. Her muscles burned, arms aching. The zip tie was too tight; her hands were going numb.

There was a pause, then: “Oh?” Irritation in the woman’s voice. It was only a drop, an iota, but it was there. Nicole fought back a smug grin pulling at her tired face.

“I haven’t learned much—yet.” She started, forcing ease into her voice. “What’s he doing in the Sheriff’s department? The locals aren’t happy that he seems to be taking over, dropping things on some important cases like the McCready murder, delegating deputies like he runs the place. Where did he get that power, anyway? He wasn’t on any database I could find, but he has to be some sort of government agent to get that kind of power. What is he? RCMP? CSIS? Canada Post?”

The Wolf Woman ignored her questions. “So you _have_ been busy, haven’t you?”

Nicole shrugged, nonchalant, as if she wasn’t tied up and blindfolded, being held against her will in some clandestine location, probably surrounded by people who either had the legal authority to kill her and wipe her existence from all official records to cover it up, or at least the means to do it. “I’m a good tail. That’s why you hired me, isn’t it?”

“Of course.” Ire dripped from the Wolf Woman’s lips like venom. “Your job in Purgatory is simple: Assimilate into the town. Become one of the locals. Get drinks at the bar, work on a farm, I don’t know—whatever small-town hicks do for fun. But get close to Dolls and keep tabs on him. See what he’s up to, who he talks to, what he’s working on—that sort of thing.”

“That’s it?” Nicole asked, almost disappointed. All this cloak-and-dagger shit for _that_. “No order to whack him or anything?”

The Wolf Woman laughed, high and silvery. Of course. Even her _laugh_ would sound like the blade of a knife, sharp enough to slit a throat. “If I wanted Dolls dead, I’d just do it myself.”

“But you can’t tail him yourself?”

“You ask too many questions.”

And she gave away too many answers, without meaning to. She couldn’t tail him herself; she had to hire someone else to do it. Dolls would have recognized her, if she got too close.

Nicole shrugged. “Momma always said that was gonna get me in a lot of trouble one day.”

“Your mother sounds like she was a smart woman.” And just like that, any advantage Nicole might have fooled herself into thinking she had, had evaporated. _Was_. Past tense. Of course they knew about her mother.

“She was,” she rasped.

The Wolf Woman chuckled. Something small and plastic landed in Nicole’s lap. “That’s a burner cell. The number is already programmed into it. Call it when you find something useful. We’ll come to you. And try to wear some decent pajamas next time—underdressing to a work event is just _embarrassing_.”

Anger and beaten-down pride mixed an ugly cocktail in her stomach. Defiance rose in her throat like a favourite song. She wanted to scream. To lash out. To snap the zip tie around her wrists. To rip out the throat of whoever had pistol whipped her. To grab the Wolf Woman by the throat and squeeze, tight, tighter, tighter, until—

Boots scuffled around Nicole, and someone cut the zip tie from around her wrists, and then they were gone. By the time she ripped the blindfold off, she was alone. 

* * *

They had brought her to an empty warehouse about three miles outside of the main town. She searched the place before leaving, but as expected, there wasn’t even a trace that she had been there at all: No boot marks, no tire treads, not even a snipped zip tie. The Wolf Woman had been careful. Calculated. She knew what she was doing. Nicole was just another pawn in the game, to her. But who the other pawns were, who the queen was, and the knights and rooks and bishops? That was a mystery Nicole had only just begun to puzzle out.

The sun was just beginning to peak over the horizon when she left the warehouse, colouring the sky slate grey, washing away the darkness of night slowly as she walked.

It took nearly an hour to walk back to her apartment, barefoot and in her pajamas—not even wearing a _bra_ , for God’s sake. By the time she returned to town, its residents had already begun to wake, on their way to work or to the store or out on their morning runs. They gave Nicole odd looks, but the weary glare she sent back stopped anyone from asking what she was doing outside in her underwear.

Up the stairs and back into her new apartment. She stood for a moment in the middle of the living room and looked around.

There were boot prints on the living room carpet, and the pillows and blankets had been thrown off her bed completely when they grabbed her. It looked like they had simply walked in through the front door—of course they had. Because what was a dastardly, devious plan without the chilling knowledge that nowhere was safe for her? That they could get into her apartment, her space, her life?

The stray cat sat on the overstuffed armchair in the living room, amidst the chaos, flicking its tail irately at Nicole as she stood, surveying the damage. It looked at her with almost intelligent eyes, unblinking, as if waiting for her to say something. She looked back at it in exasperation. “You were exactly _no_ help—how did you even get in here again? I shut the windows. _Shoo!_ ”

But the cat stayed. Of course.

She turned away, telling herself to deal with that later.

First, shower. Then, coffee— _lots_ of coffee.

She had work to do. 

* * *

The Sheriff’s station was a low stucco building standing in its own dirt lot, with only a few cars parked outside: three cruisers, dark Chevy Tahoe, and a beaten-up Jeep wrangler. It didn’t look like there was anyone milling about, which struck Nicole as odd. Police stations were typically always alive; there was always someone coming or going, going out on a call or coming in for questioning, at all hours. But it didn’t look like there was a single soul here.

Inside, the station didn’t look like it had been updated since the ‘70s. The teal linoleum tiles were cracked and peeling up near the corners of the halls, and the walls were painted an offensive shade of mustard yellow, accented with bare wood trim. Faded yellow wanted posters were tacked up on a corkboard near the front door, but none of the perps had been spotted since at least 1986. An AC unit shuddered and grumbled somewhere down the hall, sounding like a dying cat as it soldiered on, blowing a meager stream of slightly-colder-than-outside-temperature air through the building.

Nicole walked down the hall curiously, taking her time to reach the door at the end that led into the main reception area, looking around at everything.

Looking around for any sign of Dolls.

A bored-looking woman in her late 40’s worked on a Sudoku puzzle behind the desk, leaning back in her swivel chair, feet propped up on the counter in leisure. As Nicole leaned against the other side of the desk, the woman gave no indication that she had even noticed someone there.

“Um, excuse me?” Nicole glanced at the cheap-looking name plate on the edge of the desk. “Madge?”

The woman looked up then, briefly, before heaving a heavy, world-weary sigh and setting her feet on the ground. She looked to be already reaching for a form beneath her desk. “If you’re here to bail your man out the drunk tank, you’re gonna have to fill out Form 122-B, then—”

Nicole cut her off right there. “No, no,” Really _not what I’m here for_ , she wanted to clarify.

Madge looked up at her, annoyance painted all across her wrinkled face, and sat back in her chair. “Then how can I help you, Miss?” She said with a sickly, sarcastic sweetness in her voice that made Nicole flinch.

“I was hoping to look through any open case files y’all have for bounty hunters?” Nicole said, hoping enough of that slight Western drawl still lingered in her syllables that Madge wouldn’t be able to turn away such a _nice-sounding, respectable young thing_ like her.

Madge looked at her through beady eyes, saying nothing for a moment. “You got ID on you, Miss?”

Nicole handed over her driver’s license and bounty hunting license, and Madge typed their ID numbers into the ancient Windows 95 computer that wheezed and groaned as it worked. “Everything looks to be in order here, but unfortunately we don’t have jurisdiction over many of our open case files.” Madge said after a few minutes.

“Wait, what? How can you not have jurisdiction?” Nicole asked.

Madge looked at Nicole like she was not worth wasting time that could be spent working on a Sudoku puzzle. “Couldn’t tell ya, sweetheart, that’s above my pay grade.”

“Do you know whose pay grade it _is_?” Nicole demanded now, temper spiking.

Madge leaned back in her chair, turning toward the bull pen behind her, and hollered out across the empty room: “ _Randy, get on out here, will ya!_ ”

A door on the other side of the bull pen cracked open, and an aging man ambled out, rubbing his stubbly jowls as if he had just woken up from his nap. His Sheriff’s uniform was wrinkled and faded, shirt fraying around the cuffs, and the khaki pants he wore looked to have been mended too many times by someone who didn’t know how to sew. He had a tired face, worn and beaten, bags bulging beneath his eyes and a badly clipped moustache that still brushed his bottom lip. He walked slowly, as if his joints were giving him hell so early in the morning (though it was nearly lunchtime, really), and he looked at Nicole without much interest in his expression. There was no curiosity left in him, only a demand to know why he was being called out here.

“Sheriff Randy Nedley, ma’am, pleasure to meet you,” he said in a rough voice that sounded like he needed a coffee, and he extended a hand over the counter that Nicole was almost scared to shake, in case she broke it. But his grip was strong, still—much stronger than she had been expecting. Firm. He was a tired old man, perhaps, but he was not done for just yet.

“Nicole Haught,” she returned.

The Sheriff gave her an interested look. “Haught?” Nicole nodded. “We had a family by the name of Haught, out a near the Big City—they’re all gone now, I think, even that boy of theirs, what was his name, Madge?”

Madge paused for a moment, pencil hovering above a square in her puzzle. “Tristan, I think—yes, Tristan Theodore, that’s what his Momma used to call him, we used to call him Teddy when we was in school. His parents were Lucy and Ben, remember them? Lucy used to bake the cookies for Town Hall meetings?”

Nedley nodded. “’S right, Lucy and Old Bennie. They passed on—oh a few years ago now, I reckon, and their boy ran off with his girlie, I think. Any relation to you?”

Nicole’s throat felt like it had swelled, hand curling into a fist around the material at the hem of her t-shirt, out of their line of sight. “Couldn’t tell you,” she lied, hoping there was no wavering in her voice, no shaking. “I’m from out east, sir, just outside Toronto.”

The Sheriff grunted, interest waning from his eyes, tiredness taking over once more. “You’re a long way from home then.” He leaned a shoulder against the door frame, thumbs hooked into his belt.

Nicole shrugged, moving past the cinching in her heart, forcing herself to calm. “I’m here on business, actually—your receptionist says y’all don’t have jurisdiction over the open case files for bounty hunters?”

Nedley nodded at that, slow and deliberate. “Yes, ma’am. Most of those files have been signed over to a special cross-border task force workin’ out of the precinct right now. You’d have to ask their Deputy to look into those files.” As an after thought, he added in a low grumble: “Though I doubt you’re gonna get much out of _that_ dickhead.”

Nicole had to stifle a laugh as Madge looked up from her puzzle and swatted Nedley in the stomach, scowling. “Randall Nedley, you watch your language, or I’ll tell Chrissy you’ve been throwing out those salads she’s been making you for lunch and ordering in from Shorty’s instead.”

Nedley looked properly scolded at that, trying to disappear behind his moustache and his blush. He mumbled something that sounded like an apology and stood up straighter, readjusting the collar of his shirt. Whoever this Chrissy was, Nicole thought, the Sheriff seemed to be well and truly afraid of angering her.

“Well, at any rate, their offices are just back that way, if you’re real set on finding a case to work here in Purgatory.” Nedley said, pointing down the way Nicole had just come. “Take your first right, their office should be the second door on your left. My advice though?” Nicole waited for him to continue. “Just move on, Haught. Purgatory’s a strange town. Not many folks are built right for it, understand?”

“Yeah,” Nicole nodded sincerely. “Yeah, I understand. Thanks for the help, Sheriff.”

Nedley nodded, a pensive sort of nod that said he wasn’t really surprised to see Nicole wave goodbye to them at the desk, then turn down the first hall on her right, looking for the second door on her left. No, he wasn’t really surprised at all. Instead, he rubbed his chin, thinking of his daughter, Chrissy. She’d like this woman, he decided. This woman seemed tough, and built for something more than they had had to offer her in Toronto. He wondered what it was. He wondered, whatever it was, if it was in Purgatory. He wondered if she knew what it was. He wondered if there was any coffee left in the pot, or if Dolls drank it all again.

Ambling toward the break room, he rubbed at his chin, thinking he needed to shave soon. Thinking his Chrissy would like this woman very much, indeed. 

* * *

The second door on the left looked very much just like all the other doors in the station, except this door had thick brown packaging paper taped over the cracked, dirty window set into it. No other door had that, as far as Nicole had seen. Someone had written on the paper in large, blocky lettering with a sharpie: **BLACK BADGE DIVISION**.

She tried the handle, and it twisted easily, unlocked.

She thought nothing of it as she pushed into the room beyond the door—

It was a generic enough office, if a little messy and eccentric. The table that took up the middle of the room was littered in dozens of shaky surveillance photos, all connected with bits of red and blue string, mapping out paths that Nicole didn’t understand. The walls were covered with large corkboards leaned up against them, each filled with a different suspect profile. Case files overflowed on desks, mixed in with lab reports and evidence bags. It looked like the cluttered mess of a detective’s mind, and as Nicole stepped into it, she was brought barrel-to-nose with a Glock.

“ _Hands in the air, now!_ ”

Nicole froze, holding her hands up in surrender.

A man held the military-grade handgun that was trained on her forehead. She followed the arm that held it with her eyes, up to a face that she had seen before. She tried not to react— _forced_ herself not to react—as she looked Dolls in the face. She hoped there was no recognition in her face. She hoped all those nights spent playing poker with Nan Ava and her Seniors Club weren’t all for nothing.

Facing down the barrel of his gun, though, the only thing she could think was that he was taller than she had expected.

Not that she had particularly expected anything from him, especially where his height was concerned, but still. He was taller than she would have thought, if she had thought on it at all.

He was a serious-looking man, his dark eyes drilling into her in a way that spoke of military experience—Nicole had known enough soldiers in her lifetime to know the look of one: Steeled and emotionless as he looked down the sight of a gun. Unblinking and unwavering. There was no hesitation left in him. The instinct to flee had been wiped clean from his mind, leaving only the instinct to fight back instead.

Looking past Dolls, Nicole noticed four things about the rest of the scene she had walked into:

First, that there were two other people in the room with Dolls.

Second, that one of these people was the woman she had met yesterday, Waverly.

Third, that she had apparently interrupted an important meeting of sorts between these “ _Black Badge Division_ ” officers, whatever that meant.

Fourth, that there was an old map taped to a board leaning against the wall behind Waverly that looked familiar, but just a little bit wrong, somehow.

Behind Dolls stood another woman holding a gun, but this gun didn’t look like the military-grade weaponry that Dolls held. This gun looked like an antique, an old pistol from a cheesy spaghetti Western, perhaps. The woman who held it looked hardened, angry. She was slim, lithe, with a sharp chin and sharp eyes and a sharp sneer—almost everything about her seemed to be fashioned after a switchblade, really. Dark hair spilled in waves down her shoulders that were covered by a worn-out leather jacket. She wore ripped jeans and biker boots that had definitely seen a bar fight or two. She held her gun with one hand, finger poised on the trigger, and the other arm was held out behind her as a shield, covering Waverly.

Waverly looked to be the only one of the three who didn’t have a gun—at least, not one that Nicole could see. Instead, she held a book. An old leather-bound book that was curling around the edges of its pages and had slips of paper spilling out of it at all angles, paperclipped and pasted in. It looked like it was bursting at the seams with knowledge, and Waverly held it close to her chest as if trying to protect it. Her lips parted in surprise, eyebrows screwing up in confusion.

“Nicole?” She asked.

The woman shielding her looked at Waverly over her shoulder, incredulous and accusing. “ _That’s_ Nicole?” Waverly shrugged, smiling sheepishly. Nicole wondered what Waverly had said about her—and why.

She waved weakly—well, she still had two guns on her, so it was more of a tentative finger-wag than anything. “I’d say it’s nice to see you again, but, well—”

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” Dolls interrupted coolly. Nicole’s attention snapped back to the Glock at the end of her nose.

“Nicole Haught,” she said, wondering idly what kind of cruel twist of fate would let her meet someone like Waverly one day, and then get held at gunpoint the next. “I was told this was where I could go to ask about open case files for bounty hunting?”

“ID?” Dolls demanded.

Nicole moved to pull out her wallet, slowly, keeping her eyes level with the bridge of Dolls’ nose. He took the wallet from her careful fingers, flipping it open. After a moment, he clicked the safety back on his gun and replaced it in its holster at his side, though Nicole noticed he didn’t fasten the clip again. The woman behind him did the same.

“We’re not releasing any case files into anyone else’s custody until our clerk has finished going through all of them.” He flipped the wallet closed again and returned it to its owner, face expressionless as he spoke. “Now, if you’ll please vacate the premises, and if you ever enter my office again without first knocking, I’ll have you arrested for treason.” He waved a hand to usher Nicole out the door before she could even argue that he had no right to hold case files hostage, and then it clicked in her head. She planted her feet firmly and pointed to the map over that had looked familiar but just a little bit off.

“Is that Pendle Forest behind the old Thompson farm?”

Dolls stood up straighter, clasping hands behind his back. “That’s classified, ma’am.” His words were coated in ice and capped with thinly veiled threats. Nicole didn’t need to see Underneath to get the kind of rage that was only beginning to churn just beneath the surface of his blank face. “Now it’s time you go.”

Nicole ignored him—though she wasn’t exactly sure why. Her mouth seemed to have a mind of its own, that completely disregarded the way Dolls and the other armed woman were glaring at her with unbridled apprehension. “That map you have is wrong, though.”

“It is?” Waverly pushed her way forward from behind the woman with the antiquated gun hanging at her hip.

Nicole looked cautiously to Dolls as she answered. “Yeah—I mean, unless whole crops of trees have grown back in the last 10 years.”

She stepped toward the board, meaning to point to the parts on the map that shone in her memory from bright summer days spent playing King of the Castle with her cousins, but Dolls blocked her, pressing a hand to her shoulder in warning. “Thank you, ma’am. Now _leave_.”

Nicole opened her mouth to argue, but Waverly beat her to it.

“No,” She said. “No, show me what’s wrong with the map—we need help, Wynonna,” she spoke to the woman who had been trying to shield her, as the woman (Wynonna, apparently) looked back severely.

“Not from— _her_ —” Wynonna argued. “You _know_ we can’t, Waves—”

“Do you have a better idea?” Waverly snapped quickly. “We’ve been staking out the forest for _weeks_ , Wy. The area is way too big to survey well enough to find Jack, unless we know where to look for him.”

Wynonna tried to argue again, and Nicole couldn’t help but notice the similarities between them. They both stood like warnings, though Wynonna was more of a sign screaming “ _BEWARE_ ” whereas Waverly was like a quietly whispered premonition. They both held their heads high, steadfast and enduring. “Isn’t there some other survey you haven’t checked—”

“There’s not.” Waverly asserted. “Trust me, Wy.”

There was something heavy in Waverly’s gaze that Nicole couldn’t see. The two women looked at each other like they were having a private, unspoken conversation—an argument passing between them that no one else could understand.

After a moment, Wynonna relented, shoulders dropping in defeat. “Fine.” She looked back at Nicole, and Nicole flinched, trying not to look her in the eye. “Fix the map.”

There was no request in her voice, and no room for even Dolls to argue, apparently. He dropped his hand from holding Nicole back, but let it fall to rest on the gun in his holster, barely tamed anger burning in his face.

Nicole backed away from him slowly, wondering in the back of her mind what she had walked into here. “Do you—”

Waverly beat her to the punch, fishing a dulled nub of a pencil from the pocket of her cardigan and passing it over with a small, sympathetic smile.

Nicole nodded, pulling up the memories in her mind. “The property line is wrong, first of all.” She drew a shaky line on the map, trying to follow the trail of the broken-down fence she had been so accustomed to hopping as a child. “It doesn’t actually extend as far as Canary Creek—Thompson snuck into the county records office about 15 years ago and changed the map himself, to get a building permit.” Next, she circled off a large portion of the south-eastern forest, about 25 square kilometers. “And here, there aren’t any trees here, it’s a huge clearing at the bottom of a circle of cliffs, pretty well-protected—you’re trying to find someone, right?”

She looked back at the three of them crowded around her at the board. Dolls gave no indication that he had even heard her question, and Wynonna only gave her a steely look, jerking her chin to the board. “Classified,” she said. Nicole tried not to roll her eyes.

“Everything in this building is classified, isn’t it?” She muttered, mostly to herself.

“Yes,” Waverly spoke up, her voice smaller than it had been. Dolls and Wynonna shifted their gazes to her, and she seemed to shrink even more. “Yes, we’re—we’re trying to find someone. This clearing, does it have any caves or—or anything? Anywhere that someone might be able to hide for weeks?”

Nicole thought back to being 11 and sitting at the edge of those cliffs, looking down and all around, trying to ignore the feeling in the pit of her stomach that told her to reach out and hold Annie Winters’ hand. “Um, no, no caves. If you’re trying to find someone who’s been in this forest for a few weeks, best place I can think of would be the old cabins…”

She chewed her lip, tracing the path back to the cabins in her mind. _Over the broken fence post at the edge of Thompson’s property line, left at the cherry tree with someone’s initials carved into it, follow the creek down…_ She drew three small rectangles over the printed tree pattern on the paper. “I’m not sure when they were built, and they don’t have any electricity or running water, but they’ve got old wood-burning stoves and their roofs are still intact—or, they were 10 years ago. They should still be in pretty good shape, though. They’re not on any county surveys, and I don’t think they’re even hooked up to the power grid, but if you’re looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found, I’d bet they’re there.”

“How do you know this?” Dolls asked, suspicious.

Nicole shrugged. “I used to play there as a kid, with my cousins. We used them as our secret forts.” A smile tried to pull up at her lips, thinking of the long days she, Greg, and Bea had spent fixing up the small cabins, pretending to make them their own. “They’re kind of tricky to get to, though. We used to have to ride our bikes to the edge of the forest and walk in.”

“Can you write down instructions?” Waverly asked.

Nicole shook her head. “I haven’t been there in 10 years, and even then, I mostly used muscle memory for how to get there. I—I’d have to show you.”

Wynonna threw her hands up in exasperation at that. “Of _fucking_ course. Do you want a badge and my sister’s number while we’re here?”

“ _What?_ ” Nicole and Waverly shrieked at the same time—Nicole perplexed, and Waverly horrified.

But Wynonna took no notice. “Look, Haught Sauce, you seem nice, really, but this is _classified_ , and quite frankly not something some rookie flatfoot bounty hunter like you could even understand, so kindly pack up the dimples and leave this office now.”

Defiance rose in Nicole with the hackles on the back of her neck. “The best place to hide in these woods is those cabins, and like it or not they were _built_ to be hard to find, so unless you want to spend hours walking around in circles, just let me show you where to find them.”

Wynonna watched her with immutable ire, jaw clenching as she ground her molars in thought, muscles tense. Nicole wondered if her hand wasn’t inching toward the gun on her belt again.

Waverly watched with bated breath, eyes shifting between Nicole and her sister, biting the nail of her thumb. Dolls watched on as well as the two women seemed to be arguing something neither was entirely aware of yet, though he was much less visibly agitated than Waverly. He sat on the lip of the table, unmoving, waiting to see how it played out without his intervention. Or maybe he was simply planning something, in his head. Nicole didn’t know; he gave nothing away, and she was too preoccupied trying to win a staring contest with a perfect stranger to See Underneath him.

But the tension passed from Wynonna’s fingers at the handle of her gun, and Waverly let out a small breath, barely audible but for the fact that the rest of the room was silent.

“Fine,” Wynonna said through gritted teeth. “You get us there and leave _immediately_ , got it?”

Nicole nodded. “Got it.”

“Good. You take your car, and Dolls, Waves, and I will follow in ours—”

“I’ll ride with Nicole,” Waverly piped up, and Nicole tensed once more, waiting for World War III to break out at the hands of Wynonna Earp. But Waverly gave her sister no opening to argue, already grabbing her purse off a coat hook in the corner and a walkie talkie from a charging pod on a desk. “She’ll need directions to the Thompson’s farm, right?”

Nicole fumbled for a response, all available brainpower focused on not tripping over her own feet as Waverly dragged her by the wrist to the door. “ _Wha_ —I—I don’t—”

“Channel 4 on the talkie, try to keep up!” Waverly threw brightly over her shoulder as the door to the Black Badge Division clicked shut behind them. 

* * *

Nicole drummed her fingers nervously on the steering wheel, trying not to look too often at Waverly sitting in the passenger seat of her truck. She silently berated herself for not cleaning up the truck’s cab a bit; empty Tim’s cups littered the cupholders, and old parking passes nearly filled the dashboard. The glovebox was bulging slightly, the corners of old takeout menus and newspaper articles peeking out incriminatingly.

Neither she nor Waverly had spoken for the past ten minutes, since Waverly had plopped herself into Nicole’s passenger seat with purpose and directed Nicole to take the main road out of town. The silence was deafening, to Nicole’s ears, and discomfort had wedged its way into her, stirring all sorts of unpleasant critters in her stomach.

It was Waverly who broke the silence, though— “How did you know the map was of the forest behind Thompson’s farm?”

Nicole had to think on it for a moment, startled by the suddenness of her question. “I—I spent a lot of time there, as a kid.”

“You’re not from around here, though.” It wasn’t a question, simply a fact that Nicole didn’t recall sharing with her.

“How did you—?”

“Your new landlady, Flo? She also works at the library; she and I chat a lot when I’m in there working on my dissertation. She said she had a new tenant coming in from out of town that was a ‘ _tall drink of redhead_ ’—her words, not mine.” Waverly explained, choosing to look out the side window as she spoke, though Nicole could still see the hint of a blush creeping up her neck. “Plus, your accent,”

Nicole looked at her out the corner of her eye. “I don’t have an accent.”

Waverly looked at her then, a hint of a cheeky smile on her face. “Say ‘ _Toronto_ ’.” Nicole did, though she wasn’t sure what would become of it. Waverly pointed accusingly. “There! That accent. You say it like ‘ _Tron-oh_ ’. You take out half the syllables.”

Nicole chuckled, impressed. “Clever catch, Sherlock.”

Waverly sat back in her seat, seeming a bit more comfortable in the cab now, holding her head high in triumph. “Elementary, my dear Haught.” Nicole wished she wasn’t driving, so that she could see the amusement, the playfulness, on Waverly’s face just then. She’d bet it was a beautiful thing to see. She hadn’t even known Waverly a full 24 hours, and yet she was already beginning to see that most things about Waverly were beautiful, in one way or another. “Now come on,” Waverly urged. “How do you know about Thompson’s farm?”

Nicole considered for a moment if she should lie, keep some sort of cover. She was, after all, supposed to be doing a job. But, the best covers were always the ones that were closest to the truth, so she took a stabilizing breath, rubbing her tattoo nervously. “My parents _were_ from around here—not Purgatory, but Momma lived on a farm not too far away, and my dad was from the Big City. They moved out to the Toronto area when Momma get pregnant with me, but I spent my summers here with my grandparents, on the farm. Used to go exploring all the time with my cousins.”

Some of the playfulness faded from Waverly’s eyes, replaced with genuine interest and curiosity. “Sounds like a great way to spend your summers.”

Nicole shrugged. “Gave me some great stories to tell my friends back in Toronto. No one else could say they knew how to herd cattle on horseback while getting eaten alive by mosquitos.” She gave Waverly a wry smile, and Waverly giggled, imaging a teenaged Nicole out in the sun, rounding up stubborn cattle in her cute Stetson. “What about you? Have you lived here your whole life?”

Waverly nodded, leaning an arm against the door and head in her palm. “Unfortunately,” she muttered. “My… my Momma left us when I was 4, and Daddy died when I was 6. I don’t remember Momma much, and Daddy…” She bit her lip but didn’t continue that thought. “Wynonna and I, we were raised by our Aunt Gus and Uncle Curtis.” She played with the hem of her cardigan, gaze far away, somber.

Nicole took a steadying breath, knuckles of both curling tightly around the steering wheel as she told herself— _again_ —to not look at the woman beside her. “I’m so sorry,” she said, softly. “My dad, he left, too, when I was 7.” Waverly looked up at that, letting her gaze settle on Nicole unabashedly, a question in her expression that Nicole couldn’t focus on just then. She kept her eyes on the road in front of her as she continued. “He and Momma were young when they had me, just 19—never even got married. I guess he just… realized he wanted something else, eventually. At least, that’s what Momma said. She raised me on her own—well, she had help from the neighbours, and my grandparents. But she died a few years ago.”

Slowly, carefully, Waverly reached out a hand and let it rest on Nicole’s arm, a small, sympathetic smile on her face. Nicole let her gaze drop from the road in front of them to Waverly beside her. She let herself return the sad smile with one of her own, let herself lean into Waverly’s fingertips that were so soft, so caring against her bare arm. Let the tension in her shoulders leak out through those fingertips, draining away her discomfort, her sadness, and the grief that had stayed with her since the funeral. It would all be back—it always was, never stayed away too long—but for now it was enough. It helped.

“I’m sorry,” Waverly said, soft, hardly more than a whisper.

Nicole swallowed thickly, her voice coming out in only a hoarse whisper, barely audible even in the silence of the truck. “Me too,”

The crackle of the walkie talkie in Waverly’s lap made them both jump, and Wynonna’s voice spoke from the dark Tahoe that had been trailing them for the past twenty minutes. “ _Chhht! Bacon Doughnut to Angel Pants, come in Angel Pants, do you read me? Over._ ” Waverly dropped her hand from Nicole’s arm to answer, and Nicole tried not to mourn the loss of such gentleness, such warmth and tenderness. She shook her head and focused back on the road.

“Angel Pants to Bacon Doughnut, I read you loud and clear. Over.” Waverly spoke into the talkie, her voice taking on the twang of an old 1920’s radio host.

“ _How much longer ‘till we get to the forest? I gotta pee like a motherfucker and Dolly Parton here is being an uptight dick—_ tator _. I was gonna say dictator, don’t get your panties in a twist, Dolls. Oh—Over._ ”

Nicole checked a road sign as they passed it. “Should be about twenty minutes before we get to the forest. Then we’ll have to get out and hike.”

Waverly relayed the information over the talkie, and Wynonna sent back an answer that sounded like a mixture of biblical prayer and enough profanity to make a nun faint. The talkie fell silent once again.

Nicole looked at Waverly, smiling, ignoring the lingering hints of sadness that still ebbed at the corners of her mind. “’ _Angel Pants_ ’?”

Waverly laughed. “What? Wynonna comes up with the code names, not me.”

Nicole laughed with her, and they fell into an easiness for the rest of the trip, chatting lightly about nothing in particular, the heaviness from just minutes ago melted away like ice in the middle of summer, dripping off them with languor. Neither woman seemed to notice when Nicole dropped a hand from the steering wheel and let her arm rest on the console between them, or when Waverly did the same, or when they let bare skin brush just lightly. And if they both pressed into that touch, even without realizing it? Well, no one would tell on them but the trees that passed in a blur as they drove, and the stars above, still hidden by daylight, tucked away, asleep until dusk but always watching nevertheless. 

* * *

Nicole hadn’t stepped foot in the Pendle Forest behind old Thompson’s farm in nearly ten years; not since she and her cousin Greg were 17. They had stolen a bottle of maple whiskey from their Nana’s liquor cabinet and lit a bonfire near the old cabins, to celebrate the end of summer. There had been five of them, that night: Nicole and Felicity, Greg, and Joey Parker and his twin sister Minnie. They had sat under the stars around a roaring fire for hours, until nearly dawn, passing the whiskey bottle in a circle, talking as if they would be young forever, as if nothing could ever be _that_ bad as long as they had each other. They had laughed and sang and drank, and when Nicole and Felicity snuck off into the trees Greg and Joey threw graham crackers at them, singing “ _Nicole and Felicity, sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G,_ ” until Nicole chased them away, threatening to break Joey’s arm again.

(They had teased her relentlessly that entire summer for the way Felicity made her giggle and blush like a little kid with a schoolyard crush, but in the end, _she_ was the only one who got to press an unbelievably beautiful girl against a tree and make her beg for mercy).

The forest seemed to stand so cold and lifeless now, and the pine trees that had seemed to soar and pulse with life when she was a teenager, now didn’t seem all that tall or all that full of life, full of memories and laughter and adventure. Now, Pendle Forest just seemed like a wall of dull trees.

Nicole sighed as she shut the door to her pickup at the edge of the forest, making sure to grab the hoodie lying in the back seat—mosquitos were already beginning to swarm around her in the dead of the hot summer day.

Wynonna had just returned from squatting somewhere inside the treeline to deal with her “ _raging bladder ready to bust a nut_ ” (her words), and Waverly stood with Dolls, going over something in that small leather-bound notebook of hers. They had parked their cars just off the road, behind a small crop of trees that marked the beginning of the forest.

“Where to now, Lone Ranger?” Wynonna asked glibly, redoing the fly of her jeans.

Nicole nodded to herself, looking at the treeline, trying to find the familiar marker she and Greg had left when they were kids, so they could remember where to enter. It took her a moment—she hoped no one had moved it since—but no, it was still there. Faded and tattered from the elements, but still there: an old handkerchief tied around the broken fence post that had loose boards. “Here,” she said, grabbing the topmost board and pulling it until the nail popped out and the board swung to the ground. “We go into the trees here.”

She waved for the others to follow, climbing over the waist-high fence and into the thicket beyond.

“I’m just saying,” Wynonna commented as they entered the treeline. “If you’re planning on murdering us in the middle of this forest, I’m gonna kick your ass so hard you’ll see tomorrow.”

Nicole chuckled to herself. _You won’t need to kick my ass very hard for that._

They fell into a natural pace, climbing through the trees: Nicole in front, pausing every now and then to look for the markers she and Greg had left dotted throughout the forest when they were 9 and exploring Pendle for the first time; Waverly just behind her, making notes in that book of hers of the forest’s natural features, asking Nicole questions every now and then about how she knew where to go; and Dolls and Wynonna following them at the rear, both with their guns drawn, watching the forest around them as if they expected the enemy to jump out at any moment and attack. They seemed to be whispering between themselves, discussing something Nicole couldn’t hear and to which Waverly paid no mind.

“So,” Nicole tried casually, about five minutes into the hike, when it looked like Wynonna and Dolls were preoccupied enough with their own discussion to care what Nicole said. “Who’s this Jack guy you’re after?”

Waverly looked up from her book at that, caught off guard. “Huh?” Her pencil stopped on the page.

“The guy you’re here to find—Jack, right?” Nicole repeated. “Why’s he important?”

“Oh,” Waverly closed the book, using the pencil to mark her page, and slipped it in the satchel slung across her shoulder. “Uh. He’s a bad guy.”

Nicole snorted. “I would hope you’re not hunting down a good guy.”

Waverly laughed nervously, scratching her scalp. “Right. Sorry, it’s just—”

“Classified?” Nicole supplied, and Waverly gave her an apologetic smile.

“Classified.” She agreed. “He’s just. Evaded the cops long enough.”

“So is that what the Black Badge Division does? Finds the criminals that got away?” Nicole asked, ducking beneath a low-hanging bough, feeling blindly around the base of the tree trunk for the initials someone had carved into it— _there_. ‘ _AB+CK_ ’. She steered the four of them a little to the west now, into the thicker part of the forest, where light had a harder time reaching the ground. “Sounds like bounty hunting to me.”

Waverly paused a moment before answering, considering her words carefully. “BBD is… a different kind of hunting, I suppose. We investigate the bigger cases that Purgatory PD can’t handle.”

Nicole looked at her over a shoulder, laughing at the sight of Waverly angrily swatting a mosquito, slapping herself hard in the face, leaving an angry red mark on her cheek. Waverly shot her an angry look in return. “So what, you’re the Hail Mary Squad?”

Up a small crag—Nicole had to pull herself up using the branch hanging down over the rock face, and then pull Waverly up after her, the way Greg used to when she was still too short to reach by herself. “Well,” Waverly said, dusting dirt off her palms. “I wouldn’t quite put it like that—I mean, have you heard my sister speak?”

Nicole conceded. “Fair point, she does make a sailor sound like a saint.”

“That’s putting it lightly.”

“Well, no one’s perfect.”

“Hey, Clifford the Big Red Dog!” As if her ears were burning, Wynonna called from a few paces back in the trees, irritation evident in her voice. A bird fluttered from its branch somewhere above. “Quit flirting and walk faster! None of us are getting _any_ younger!”

Nicole rolled her eyes exaggeratedly. “I have a _name_ , you know!” She called back to Wynonna.

“Yeah but using it would imply I care about you as a person, so,” Wynonna shrugged in a fake apology, ignoring the daggers her sister was glaring at her. “Tough nuggets, Cliff.”

Nicole sighed, looking up to the heavens—perhaps in prayer, perhaps simply to check the branches above them for the next marker. “So I’m sensing that your sister doesn’t like me much.” She said to Waverly, who had fallen into step with her as they twisted around a path on the forest floor that only existed in Nicole’s memory, voice lower this time so that the sister in question couldn’t hear.

Waverly shook her head. “Don’t take it too personal—she’s just protective.”

Nicole considered this for a moment, checking her bearings against the rock formation atop a small hill to their left that kind of looked like a hand flipping the middle finger at them. “That’s sweet, I guess. I never had a sibling to worry about me like that. Closest I had was Greg, and we only saw each other two months a year.” 

“It gets annoying sometimes, trust me.” Waverly said. “But I appreciate it. After Daddy died… Well, Wynonna’s reputation precedes her, in Purgatory.”

And it did—Nicole had barely been in town a day, and yet she had already begun to hear the whisperings of Wynonna Earp. People had talked about it the night before, at Shorty’s, hushed conversations over beers, heads leaned in close like they were telling each other secrets. They had glanced at Waverly nervously, wondering if she was going to turn out like _that_ , like _her sister_ , or if she was going to be _normal._ Nicole hadn’t thought it was anyone’s business, but she was curious, now, what Wynonna’s reputation had to do with her protectiveness. She waited for Waverly to continue as they picked their way over a fallen tree that was almost as thick as Waverly was tall.

(Nicole had to lift her up by the hips so that Waverly could reach the handhold Greg had chiseled into the tree with a pocketknife, and she tried not to smile at the way Waverly’s cheeks dusted in a rosy blush as Nicole helped her).

Over the tree, Waverly continued, voice low, watching Wynonna and Dolls warily. The pair had moved out in front of Waverly and Nicole now, slowly picking up the trail Nicole and Greg had created as kids. “After Daddy died,” Waverly said, “Wynonna got into… a lot of trouble, around here. With the cops and all. But she always made sure I never did any of that—she was all ‘ _do as I say, not as I do_ ’, y’know?” Nicole nodded in understanding. Her mother had done the same sort of thing, when Nicole was a teenager. “As soon as she turned 18, though, they sealed up her juvie record and she got about as gone as a girl could get—just up and left us—left _me_. I barely saw her for nine years. She’d show up every now and then, but never for long. Last time she left, she was gone for three years. Didn’t come back until Uncle Curtis’ funeral last year. I think now she’s trying to make up for all that lost time she spent doing just about anything else besides being a big sister to me. And she’s trying to keep me safe, I guess. The two of us, we’re all that’s left of our family, so.”

Waverly stopped a moment, looking at Nicole apologetically, chastised. “God, I’m so sorry—I—I _just_ met you—I don’t even know your middle name, and here I am dumping my whole life’s story on you.”

Nicole slowed her steps to a halt beside Waverly. Waverly looked at her through sad eyes, embarrassed and berating herself for all she had spilled to this perfect stranger. She looked as if she was trying to fold in on herself, take up as little space as possible. It made Nicole’s heart clench. “Hey,” Nicole breathed, gentle and kind. “Don’t worry. You’re okay, Wave.” _It’s okay._

She tried not to think too much about what she was doing as she placed a reassuring hand on Waverly’s shoulder—tried not to think too much about the way Waverly seemed to flinch at the touch, draw away at first, then relax beneath Nicole’s fingertips, a sorrowful breath falling from her pretty lips as she looked up, meeting Nicole’s soft eyes.

Nicole hadn’t meant to—hadn’t planned on it— _at all_ —hadn’t even _considered_ it—but she let their eyes meet, and let herself slip Underneath, and let Waverly’s Under Face flicker up to the surface, and in the quiet of the forest, the trees all around them seemed to have meaning again. The sun felt like it shined brighter, warmer, its rays pulsing, thriving, kissing against the skin of Nicole’s neck like a courting lover. The birds seemed to chirp more sweetly, more in tune, in a melody that sounded like all of Nicole’s favourite songs at once. The trees seemed to breathe, to grow greener, fuller, boughs blooming with the most gorgeous flowers, nectar smelling sweet and sultry and magic to Nicole. All of this centered around Waverly—the forest seemed to pulse, to exist around her, _for_ her, drawing Nicole in like a conduit, a beacon, as she gazed at the lovely face she saw Underneath.

It wasn’t any sort of Under Face Nicole was used to—each one was different, really, but this one seemed to exist everywhere _else_ , seemed to stitch everything together all around them. And yet in Waverly, all she Saw was a pair of hazel eyes that looked like she could have spent an eternity trying to map out their endless secrets and riddles and promises and at the end of it all she wouldn’t be any closer to finishing than when she started.

“ _WAVES!_ ”

The spell that seemed to engulf them cracked, splintered, glass shattering in its frame, and Nicole let her hand drop, taking a deep, shuddering breath as it felt like the air had been stolen from her lungs. Waverly dropped her gaze, clearing her throat. The rays of the sun thinned, waned, back to normal, and the trees dulled to as they had stood before, devoid of the life that Waverly seemed to have given them. Birds sang off-key and shrill, and flowers only irritated Nicole’s hay fever.

Waverly looked down at her feet. “We better…” Jerked a thumb over her shoulder, through the trees, where Wynonna and Dolls had disappeared. She didn’t wait for Nicole to reply before turning away and making to follow them.

Nicole followed suit, staying a few steps behind. “It’s Marie, by the way,” she said. Waverly didn’t slow her pace through the trees, only looked back at Nicole, confused, and so Nicole clarified. “My middle name. It’s Marie.”

She offered a small, joking smile that she hoped Waverly wouldn’t notice was brittle, nearly breaking at the loss of the warmth that had filled her only moments before. Waverly took it and smiled one of her own in return, and they moved on.

Five minutes later, they neared the edge of the clearing that Nicole knew held the old cabins. She slowed her steps, signalling for the others to do the same. “The cabins are just through here,” she said, pointing to a slight opening around two pines that formed a sort of door out into the clearing. “There are three of them. They’re not very big, but they’ve got windows facing this way, so odds are your guy will see you coming and make a run for it into the trees. If y’all get lost in the woods, look for a blue bandana tied around a low-hanging tree branche, or a big _X_ carved into a tree trunk; my cousin and I marked paths all around this forest when we were kids, in case we got lost.”

“10-4,” Dolls said, checking the clip in his Glock and flicking off the safety. “Thank you for your assistance, Ms. Haught, now—”

“Yeah, yeah,” she waved an impatient hand. “Right back to my car, knock on your office next time or I get convicted of a capital offence, got it. You must kill it at parties.”

“Only when his gun is fully loaded,” Wynonna commented, checking the sight on her own gun. Dolls ignored this, as he probably did with just about everything Wynonna quipped.

Nicole chuckled, giving Wynonna a respectful nod as a goodbye. She turned to Waverly, giving the younger Earp a sincere, more meaningful smile as she went. Waverly watched her go, letting her eyes follow Nicole through the trees, until the redhead was gone, disappeared into the forest as if she was never really there in the first place.

Waverly tried not to shudder at the sudden chill that crawled its way up her spine, now that Nicole was gone. It wasn’t _coldness_ , per se, simply a loss of warmth. An absence of _something_ , a distinct _lacking_ that emptied her noticeably, in a way that made her frown.

“Ready?” Dolls said to Wynonna. “You got my six, Earp. Waverly—”

“I know, I know. Surveillance from the trees, tell you if anyone is coming or going.” Waverly waved a hand, looking up to the trees above them. Bracing herself against the trunk, she pulled herself up into one of the lower branches for a better vantage point.

And just like that, like clockwork, like a well-oiled machine, they begun. 

* * *

Nicole was not, generally, one to tell a lie. And it would not have been a lie to say she was curious what was going on with this BBD group. So sure, she ignored Dolls under threat of conviction of a capital crime—no one would really _blame_ her for being curious, would they?

Well, perhaps that’s what Pandora thought, too, just before shit had gone to fuck.

She had disappeared into the woods just beyond their line of sight, but she hadn’t gone too far, listening to their planning before they had gone into the clearing. She heard Dolls and Wynonna enter the clearing, and moved closer, edging her way through the trees until she had a good enough view.

The two Black Badge officers moved through the clearing slowly, deliberately, guns held up and ready. Waverly sat perched in a tree a little way down the line from Nicole, watching the cabins through a pair of binoculars that must have been in her satchel. She spoke something into the walkie talkie, and in the clearing, Wynonna answered.

The cabins were small, squat buildings that didn’t appear to be built for longevity and yet had somehow survived untold decades, unkept and falling apart at the foundation. The roof of one had caved in, though that looked to have only happened recently—the hole had yet to be covered in pine needles and acorns from the trees around it. The three cabins were arranged in a sort of V shape, around the large bonfire pit in the middle which looked like it had been used recently. Nicole found herself wondering, idly, if Greg and their friends had ever gone back there after that last summer. She pushed that out of her mind, for the time being.

All three cabins were quiet, but a thin trail of smoke curled out from the chimney of the third one, and that was where Dolls and Wynonna were headed, slinking up onto the porch, checking in windows, scouting the place carefully.

They might have looked like pros, but they were too myopic, too focused on one thing at a time. Had they been less so, they might have noticed the man picking his way through the trees, toward Waverly, moving carefully and quietly, like he knew exactly where to step to avoid making any noise at all. He was a tall, stringy sort of man, and he didn’t look like he had had a shower in a very long time. He wore a three-piece suit that was soiled and covered in dirt and grime, and when he smiled it seemed to pull the skin of his bald head tight over his skull, chilling Nicole to the core. His eyes were focused on Waverly, as if he were a lion and she a dormouse. As if he was on the hunt, and she was the prey.

Nicole guessed that this might be the man they were after, Jack. She didn’t need to give it a second thought before she started through the trees as well, only wishing she were faster.

She barely dared to breathe as she stepped, keeping her eyes level with Jack through the trees, watching his measured movements, making sure he didn’t do anything rash. They were both closing in on Waverly now—Nicole on Waverly’s left, and Jack on her right, both maybe fifteen feet away—

_Snap!_

Nicole froze, blood freezing cold and draining from her brain, her heart, foot planted solid to the forest floor over the branch she had snapped with her shoe. Jack froze, too, his eyes searching the trees, combing through the pines, looking for anything—

His eyes landed on her, beady and dark, and even from a distance they made Nicole taste fear on her tongue, thick and cloying. His thin lips curled into a cruel grin, mad and terrible as a Cheshire cat, and Nicole’s heart dropped out from beneath her.

Faster than Nicole could believe—faster than anything—Jack broke into a graceful sprint, reaching up to Waverly’s tree like a gymnast to a trapeze, and it was all Nicole could do to scream out in warning— “ _WAVERLY!_ ”

Too slow.

Jack was up the tree faster than should have been humanly possible, scaling the branches to Waverly’s perch in a way that could only be feral, animal. Waverly started in surprise, but her scream was cut off by Jack’s hand curling around her throat.

They fell, the two of them, toward the ground, terribly fast and dangerously hard. Nicole’s muscles seemed to unstick from themselves, pumping with new blood, new adrenaline, spurring her forward through the trees as they crash-landed, and Waverly let out a mangled cry of pain as Jack landed atop her, both hands around her neck, squeezing, his eyes dancing with delight.

There only one thought left in Nicole’s mind as she threw herself out of the line of trees and into Jack, tackling him to the ground, pulling him off of Waverly with every drop of strength she possibly had.

The man was solid, built heavier than he looked, but Nicole raked her fingers in along his cheek, and he cried out—more in frustration than in pain—as they tumbled across the ground, tearing at each other, each trying to get the upper hand. More fire filled Nicole than she even knew what to do with, and she clawed and punched and kicked as hard as she could, heart pounding, only one thing left in her mind at all— _Waverly. Save Waverly._

Their momentum slowed, and Nicole threw a punch aimed at Jack’s nose. She felt bones crunch and pop beneath her knuckles, and Jack’s head snapped back, dazed. Grabbing him by the collar, she threw him to the side, pinning him beneath all her weight.

_Waverly._

No blood spilled from the nose that was most certainly broken, judging by the odd angle at which it sat on his face, but that didn’t strike Nicole as odd, not yet.

_Save Waverly._

She closed her fist around his throat, squeezing until she could feel his windpipe beneath her fingertips, feel him swallow, feel him struggle to breathe. Instead, all she felt was him laughing, head falling back as if he was in ecstasy, eyes falling shut in pure bliss.

“Do it, Prophetess,” he choked out, voice reedy and high, giddy and full of glee. Nicole squeezed harder, not stopping to wonder at what he had just called her. “Kill me, I _dare_ you.”

“ _Shut up!_ ” She screamed, shaking him by the throat.

Jack licked his lips and peeled his beady eyes open, drilling a look into Nicole, letting her into his mind.

Nicole froze, hands no longer obeying her—nothing in her body obeyed her anymore as Jack let her into his mind, let her see the face that flickered Underneath it.

It was Hell, to put it simply. The face that was contained Underneath him was Hell. It was fear and grief and fury and regret and guilt. It was fire and judgement and eternal damnation. It was a thousand years spent screaming in torture, in agony. It was everything good that was left inside of Nicole being burnt up in a furnace of her own making—all her own past mistakes coming to haunt her at once, all the blood on her hands rising up to drown her in a pool of her own regret, her own misfortune, her own failure. It was every myth of Hell, of the Underworld, from every culture and civilization to ever exist, all in one. It was Hades and Pluto and Osiris and Satan, all at once.

It was the face of the Devil himself, and it made Nicole feel like she was being sucked into Hell.

Her hands fell away from Jack’s neck, and Jack pushed her off like she was just a ragdoll to him. She fell away, onto the ground, feeling the sky spin out above her, falling back into herself like the world’s worst kind of hangover, and then Jack was upon her again, and his nails were at her throat. They were _hot_ — _so_ hot— _burning_ hot— _how are they so hot?_ —and then she was screaming, because the pain that splintered out from her neck was like inviting Hell inside her. She was screaming and kicking and—

A gunshot cracked in her ears, close—

There was a hole, about the size of a bullet, in the center of Jack’s forehead, but there was no blood. Jack looked surprised. Delighted. His eyes turned black, then red, and his face pulsed yellow, fires toking in a forge, and he smiled.

“Go to hell, Rev Head,” someone above them said, but Nicole wasn’t sure who.

Jack laughed, turning his face to the sky. “Gladly,”

And then it was as if something pulled him off Nicole, dragged him away by his feet, and as Nicole watched, the ground fell away into a small pit, fire burning beneath it, and Jack fell in. The flames licked at him, curling around him like the maw of some great, terrible beast, swallowing him whole. The fire crackled and died, and the ground returned, and it was as if nothing had even happened at all.

Nicole sat up, shaking, eyes glued to the spot Jack had disappeared into, waiting for him to come back out.

“He’s gone.” It was Dolls who spoke, already holstering his gun, kneeling down beside Nicole on the ground.

“Wh—”

“Don’t speak yet,” Dolls said quickly, reaching out to examine her throat. She flinched away from his touch, but he held up his hands in surrender. She nodded, slowly, letting him continue. “I want Jeremy to look at these cuts—Wynonna?”

Dolls looked to Wynonna, and Nicole followed his gaze, to where they found the two Earp sisters. Waverly had crashed to the ground, hard, and lay limp as Wynonna worried over her, shaking her, trying to wake her up— “Waves? Waves? Come on baby girl, time to wake up! _Waverly!_ ”

Waverly moaned, curling in on herself, eyes screwed shut in pain. Wynonna pulled her up, bundling her baby sister up in her arms, head cradled against her shoulder. “We gotta get her to a hospital, Dolls—”

Dolls was already up, taking Waverly from her sister, carefully—Nicole noted how Wynonna seemed to trust him so completely with Waverly, without question.

Dolls looked to Nicole. “Can you walk?”

Nicole tried to nod, but the pain in her neck stopped her, so she settled for simply pulling herself up onto shaking legs, nearly crumpling in on herself before Wynonna caught her, slinging Nicole’s arm around her shoulder before Nicole could argue. Wynonna didn’t look at her as they walked to the forest—she kept her eyes trained on her baby sister in Dolls’ arms, keeping watch. Nicole didn’t mind so much. She kept her eyes on Waverly, too, watching her delicate features. She let herself get lost in them, let the sight of them take away some of the pain that wracked her body, rolled around her nerves in waves of fire. She felt sick, too—sicker than she had in a long time.

They hadn’t even gone five steps before she doubled over and wretched, emptying out everything in her stomach onto the forest floor. Wynonna only rubbed her back sympathetically, helping her stand back up again afterward, leaning more of Nicole’s weight on her as they walked, trying to catch up to Dolls, who was bounding ahead, trying to get back to the cars as fast as possible.

“Thank you,” Wynonna said as they moved through the trees. Nicole could only look at her, bleary eyed and confused. “For saving my sister.” Nicole nodded, and Wynonna seemed to take that as a good enough answer. “And, y’know. Welcome to Black Badge, I guess. Support group sessions are on Tuesdays. Sometimes we get doughnuts.”

The rest of their walk was made in silence. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nicole's a part of BBD now! She knows about the existence of Revenants! Dastardly plots are afoot! Exciting! What'll happen to our stalwart heroes next time?! Hopefully Nicole will get some goddamn rest, poor kid.  
> As you may have noticed, the rating has increased from T to M, mainly because I realized there's gonna be quite a bit of ass-kicking in this (Exhibit A: Nicole chokes out a Revenant here).  
> Special thanks to the almost-whole box of cookies I ate while writing this. If there are any spelling mistakes or anything here, I really am sorry. I have mild dyslexia and no beta-reader, so it's an uphill battle editing these sometimes.  
> Let me know what you think! Like it? Hate it? Just want Nicole to get a full night's sleep for once? Tell me! Leave a comment or come talk to me on Tumblr @astrophysical-bean (I have no idea how to insert links in HTML I'm sorry). Thank you to everyone who already has, I read all of them and I love them so much!!!


	4. A Paradise, Lost

_Beep.               Beep.               Beep.               Beep._

Nicole hadn’t been able to feel much for a few hours now.

She wasn’t sure if that was something to be concerned about or not.

It was probably just the IV drip in her arm and the pain killers someone had given her, right?

Probably nothing to be concerned about, right?

Yeah, probably.

Instead of concerned, all she was, was thirsty. Instead of worrying, all she did was sip ice water through the crazy straw that a nurse had brought her. Instead of fretting, all she did was try not to blink.

Because every time she blinked, she saw fire. Fire painted in colours of righteous damnation. Fire shaded, sculpted biblically. A paradise, lost, carved liturgy in her mind—

_A dungeon_

_horrible, on all sides around, as one great furnace flamed…_

“No,” she told the nurse, when asked, with a mechanical autonomy in her voice. “No family history of cancer or heart disease, on either side.”

_…yet from those flames…_

“One great-aunt on dad’s side with dementia, though, I think.”

_…no light…_

The nurse had strawberries printed on her bright pink scrubs.

_…but rather darkness visible…_

She told the nurse she didn’t have any emergency contact information available.

_…served only to discover sights of_

_woe…_

“No, no family nearby.”

_…regions of sorrow, doleful shades…_

(The lie burned bright in the furnace of Hell, when she blinked).

_…where peace and rest can never dwell…_

The nurse had just put Wynonna’s name down, instead.

_…hope_

_never comes_

_that comes to all…_

Waverly lay in the other hospital bed in their shared room, unconscious.

_…but torture without end still urges…_

The doctor said Waverly fractured two ribs and suffered a severe concussion, and that there might still be other damage they couldn’t see yet, so they had to monitor her until she woke up.

_…and a fiery deluge…_

(If she woke up).

_…with ever-burning sulphur…_

(Please wake up).

_…unconsumed—_

“So Jack was a demon, right?” Nicole looked to Wynonna, who sat leaning back in the uncomfortably upholstered visitor’s chair, in between her bed and Waverly’s, feet propped up on the edge of Nicole’s. At the sound of her voice, so brittle after so many hours of silence, Wynonna’s thumb froze over the screen of her phone. She looked up slowly, confused.

Nicole only returned her gaze, even and studious, sipping ice water as she waited for a response.

“How…?” Wynonna fumbled for words. “How did you know?”

Nicole gave no answer, not immediately—not when the first answer that jumped up in her mind was the truth: _I looked into the guy’s eyes and I think he pulled me into Hell with him for a hot second? Like, literally pulled me down into Hell? I don’t know, it’s a little fuzzy and I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention in Church when I was a kid. Not that they covered what a psychic like me would See of it if I ever tried to look into the eyes of a demon, anyway._ So instead, she shrugged, after a pause. “I uh… what else could it be? After you shot him like that, y’know…”

Wynonna lolled her head side to side as she thought. “Okay, fair enough, you did see him go back to Hell, so I guess it’d be a pretty logical conclusion.”

“So he _was_ a demon?”

“Well, kind of.” Wynonna said up in her chair, looking as if she was completely out of her element here. “Like… demon-adjacent, maybe? Like, _technically_ a demon, but also… not? Does that make sense?”

“Not even a little bit.” Nicole shook her head frankly. “I thought being a demon was a pretty solid thing, you either _are_ or _aren’t_. Unless I completely missed that lesson in Sunday School?”

“Yeah,” Wynonna scratched her head, scrunching her face up in discomfort. “Sorry, I just… I usually just do the blowing-demonic-face-off thing, Dolls is more the diplomat.”

Nicole nodded. “Start at the beginning, then?”

“Okay, so there was this dude God, and he said _let there be light_ and some shit—”

“Not that I wouldn’t _love_ to hear you recap the entire Old Testament,” Nicole interjected snidely, exhaustion already pulling at her bones. “But I meant, like, skip to the part about the demons? I did want to get to sleep sometime tonight.”

“You know, I don’t _have_ to explain things to you, Miss Sunday-School-McBossy-Pants.” Wynonna snapped. “But lucky for you my sister thinks your ass is top-shelf, so let me tell it my way, or we do it Dolls’ way, which was to just let you think you’re going crazy and have you forcefully committed. Is that what you want, Haught Shot? Is it?”

Nicole paused for a moment. “Waverly likes my butt?”

Wynonna groaned harshly, throwing her head back in dramatic disbelief and pinching the bridge of her nose. She took a deep breath before answering. “Not the _fucking_ point.”

Nicole’s cheeks burned, and she held up hands in surrender, trying to placate her. “Right. Sorry. Continue your way, I think you were just getting to Mount Saini?”

“ _Thank you_.” Wynonna seethed through gritted teeth, muttering something beneath her breath that sounded like ‘ _useless lesbian_ ’. “Right, so this dude God was all _let there be light_ , _let there be oceans and Wal-Mart and The Shopping Channel and shit_ , I don’t fuckin’ know, and I guess, probably around the same time He had the great idea to create underwire bras, He decided to make it a double-whammy and created demons, too. Now, a hop, skip, and a jump past all the boring parts, some floods, Nero setting Rome on fire, the completely unexpected Spanish Inquisition, and we get to the Old West, nineteenth century, right?”

“Okay,” Nicole nodded, wondering what any of this had to do with anything. “I’m with you so far, mainly because this is just history.”

“Tough fuckin’ crowd,” Wynonna muttered. “Okay, so. Old West. Nineteenth century. Ever heard of Wyatt Earp?”

Nicole thought back for a second, trying to place the name that sounded so familiar in her memories— _there_. Watching old spaghetti Westerns with Grandad Charlie and Greg, making play guns with meaty toddler fingers and pretending to arrest the “famous outlaw” Gregory Keelan. “Old Western lawman, right? Best gunslinger in the O.K. Corral or something?”

Wynonna lolled her head again, considering. “Well. _Law_ man, I dunno, he was kind of a dick, but yeah, I think that’s about the sum of him. Waves and I mostly think of him as _great-Granddaddy_. Sometimes _fuckhole_ or _shit-ticket_ , but that’s more of a personal thing, really.”

“Not a big fan of great-Granddaddy Earp, I take it?”

Wynonna’s face twisted into a sneer, cynical and angry. She lifted out the gun that poke out the top of her boot. “Wyatt killed 77 outlaws with this gun—Peacemaker, he called it.” She looked at the gun in her hand, sadness bleeding through to the surface of her face. Sadness, and exhaustion, too. As if it had made peace everywhere else in the world by stealing hers. “But see, he was about as big an asshole as you can get without literally transforming into a living sphincter with a face, so one day he rides into Purgatory, which at the time was basically just a hellmouth—not that it’s gotten much better since then, but we do have a Tim Horton’s now, so it’s at least worth saving for Roll Up the Rim season.”

Nicole shrugged. “Right, of course.” A free double-double _was_ worth living in a hellmouth, after all.

Wynonna nodded in agreement. “Right? So, Purgatory was being run by this grade-A douchecanoe, the Demon Clootie. Corruption all throughout the legal system, people getting murdered left and right, no one’s respecting the laws of dibs anymore, it’s just a shithole and a half. So Wyatt comes to town, looking to clean things up, and in the process, he crosses hairs with Clootie, kills Clootie’s sons, and good ol’ Clootie-kins puts a curse on him. That all his kills would come back to life, risen from Hell, and hunt him and all his descendants, each time one of them turns 27. Only way to end the curse is for the heir—yours truly, currently—to send all 77 Revenants back to Hell with Peacemaker, in one lifetime.”

Nicole mulled this over for a minute, considering all the information. 

All the information was this: 

  * Nicole had already known that not everything could be explained by science—that there were some things in this world that were beyond it.
  * Curses were nothing new; her Nana used to say she’d get the Iron Witch to put a curse on Nicole so that all her socks would just go missing, if she didn’t stop leaving them everywhere.
  * (Demons were new, though, but not wholly unexpected, all things considered).
  * Nicole had seen Jack being dragged down to Hell.
  * Nicole had seen Wynonna cause that, with Peacemaker.
  * Nicole had five gouges in her neck that had been cauterized as they had been cut, which at face value made no sense, because it had been Jack’s fingernails that had caused that.
  * Nicole had been sent here to observe Dolls, who was involved in something that the Wolf Woman wanted to know about, so that _something_ might as well be a demonic curse, right? (Because _really_. What _else_ could it possible fucking be?)



In the end, she was really only left with one question. “How does Waverly fit into all of this?”

Wynonna’s smile at that was callous and bitter, but it also sober, and it softened around the edges, when she looked at her baby sister. They both watched her for a moment, silent, following the steady beeping of the heart monitor that seemed too unerringly even, too painfully slow, to be _real_. To be _Waverly’s_.

“Waves is the heart and soul of this team, that’s how.” Wynonna’s voice was soft, somber, so sad and full of regret. Nicole wondered, in the back of her mind, if it was regret for how today had turned out, or if it was for every day before, and for how Waverly’s entire life had turned out, too. She didn’t ask, though. She simply nodded and waited for Wynonna to collect her thoughts. “The Black Badge Division, uh… think of it as kind of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer department of the government. Dolls has been helping me hunt down Revs since I got here last year. And for a while, it was just the two of us—I wouldn’t let Waves anywhere _near_ this shit, y’know. It was too fucking dangerous, and after—after everything we’ve lost…”

She chewed on her lip, the same way her sister did. Nicole couldn’t see her eyes at the moment, but she suspected they were wet, filling with a lifetime of heartache, of melancholy and despair. “Call me selfish, but I just couldn’t lose her, too. I only just got her back. But. She’s an Earp, ain’t she? Stubborn as Hell in high heels and a handbag. A force of nature. They should name hurricanes after her just by the way she makes her morning coffee.”

She reached across, took hold of her baby sister’s hand, rubbing a soft thumb over limp knuckles. It was a small gesture, yet the moment felt so intimate that Nicole almost wanted to look away, to give them some privacy. “She’s got the most important job of all. She’s our BBD consultant-slash-clerk-slash-historian-slash-one-who-makes-sure-we-all-don’t-blow-our-own-faces-off-on-a-daily-basis.”

“Sounds like a tough job,” Nicole meant it as a joke, but the withered look Wynonna adopted then said that it was anything but.

“It is,” and her voice was full of regret again. She looked from Waverly to Nicole, meeting Nicole’s eye, and Nicole couldn’t help it. Like being pulled into Jack’s Morningstar gaze, she felt herself slip past Wynonna’s sharpness and sarcasm, to see what was hidden Underneath—the face that seemed to be screaming to be let out.

It made Nicole flinch, made her feel light, like she’d lost the anchor mooring her to the shore. The face was Wynonna screaming, crying, begging, bartering, _See me, see me, see me, I’m here, please God help me I’m here_. She was cracking with the pain of a thousand lifetimes lived in one. It was torn-down, weathered, beaten into submission, like she had seen so much sadness, so much cruelty, and she was just so _tired_ of it all.

For all her sharpness and danger, she did not have the face of a warning, not deep down, not Underneath; she had a cry for help.

Nicole gulped dryly and thanked God she was already sitting in a bed, or else she might have just collapsed right there.

If that was the kind of life she had lived—one so sad, so full of grief and mourning—then her harshness, and her desperation to hold onto Waverly as tightly as she could, made sense. She was hard _now_ , because she hadn’t been _then_.

Nicole’s eyes to the floor. “So what _are_ you gonna do with me?” She asked.

Wynonna cleared her throat, shoving the emotion back down deep inside her where it couldn’t touch the light of day. “Dolls is off somewhere now, sucking ass to his superiors, trying to placate the situation of letting a _civilian_ in on all the hellish tomfoolery we’ve got going on around here. He won’t be back for a couple days, though; he says it’s a ‘ _long drive into town_ ’, whatever the fuck that means. But my best guess? There’s still like an 85 percent chance you’ll be thrown in prison to rot for the rest of your life—silver lining, though: BBD prison life expectancy is only like two months, so you won’t even be suffering for that long. No biggie at all, really.”

Nicole supposed she should be appalled, or scared, that the odds were in favour of her only having (on average) two months left to live, which would be spent in some Canadian gulag-type facility. She probably wouldn’t even get her Miranda rights.

Instead, she just scrubbed a hand over the length of her face, pulling her cheeks down with her fingers, making a face at Wynonna that said no less than _I have no emotional investment in this situation any-fucking-more, so good day to that._

Wynonna seemed to understand that look dearly well. She bobbed her head in agreement and pulled a shining silver flask from a pocket of the jacket that hung over the back of her chair, offering it to Nicole. “Whiskey?”

Rather than even agreeing, she just took the flask and downed the rest of the contents—perhaps three shots—in one. She sputtered and coughed as it burned down her esophagus, patting her chest, eyes watering at the syrup-mixed-with-jet-fuel taste. “Is this _corn whiskey_?”

“What are you, a whiskey snob?” Wynonna scoffed, taking her flask back indignantly.

“No, but did you make that yourself?”

“Of course, you think I have the money to _buy_ all our whiskey?”

“Well, fair enough,” Nicole grimaced as another wave of bitter aftertaste rose in her throat. “But you seriously need to re-evaluate your recipe. This tastes like you just mixed corn syrup and battery acid.”

Wynonna scowled again, rolling her eyes. “Everyone’s a _fuckin’_ critic.”

Nicole sighed, whiskey numbing her frayed nerves. “And on the off chance I _don’t_ get thrown in a government-run black site?”

Wynonna thought, for a moment, glancing at the door. Nicole followed her gaze, and they both waited—for what, Nicole didn’t know. “I don’t know. We don’t… this isn’t something we can just let people into.”

Nicole understood. This was a delicate situation they had on their hands. And it’s not like she wanted to get too involved in something that she might have to run from at a moment’s notice. No strings. No weights. No anchors. That’s how she had survived for so long. No ties.

And yet.

( _And yet?_ )

There it was again. That pull, in her stomach. That _Feeling_ that made her gut turn on its side, pointing like a compass toward Something That’s Coming.

It made her want to punch herself in the stomach, if only to get the _Feeling_ to _shut the fuck up_.

And she could have said this, she knew she could. She knew she could tell Wynonna everything, right then—that she was some kind of psychic, descended from a long line of psychics. That her dead mother had told her about Waverly, in a dream, and then teleported her from her apartment into Shorty’s, dressing her in new clothes she _hadn’t_ owned before the dream, drying and brushing her hair and everything else that went along with dolling her up, just so that she could meet Waverly and _just_ the right moment. That she was starting to think playing in Pendle Forest as a child had been no mere accident. That fate had led her and Greg to those cabins as kids, to play “King of the Castle” and “Cops and Robbers” and “We Don’t Want to Deal with the Adults Who Already Know Our Entire Futures”, for a reason. That that reason was so that she could lead these BBD agents there, 10 years later.

That everything in all their lives had happened for a reason, but she had no idea what, yet.

She kept her mouth shut, though. Just leaned back into her pillow and watched the sun set through the window beside Waverly’s bed.

Watched the dying light as it bent toward the unconscious woman, curved, craved to touch those angelic features. As the photons fought each other for the chance to dust across her hair splayed across her pillow like gold dust. As physics warped itself to accommodate something so important, so otherworldly, so outside its own comprehension of itself, as Waverly Earp.

The golden rays of light burned bright in her mind as her eyes slid shut, weighted down by a bone-cracking exhaustion that pulled her under the surface of sleep before she could even take a breath. 

* * *

Deputy Marshall Xavier Dolls stood in a dark alleyway in a town called Town, which technically didn’t exist, staring down the barrel of a gun, not for the first time, and _certainly_ not for the last.

John Henry Holliday, who preferred to be called Doc in almost every situation except where his mother was concerned (in which case he would note that she referred to him as John Henry and _only_ John Henry) stood pressed against him, back to back, trying to strike a match on its box. A cigarillo hung out of his mouth, as if a Black Badge agent hadn’t just punched him in the cheekbone a minute before.

“Sir,” Dolls began, keeping his voice even and his eyes level with the Director who pointed a handgun at the tip of his nose. “I just think that, having reviewed the facts, the civilian should be taken into custody—”

“We don’t pay you to _think_ , Agent Dolls.” The Director cut him off smoothly, finger flexing on the trigger. “We pay you to take orders.”

From over his shoulder, Doc offered help. “All due respect, you cannot order around an unthinking man. Even a prize-winning show pony has a mind of its own.” The Southern accent coloured his words eccentric and, in the eyes of the Director, unnecessary.

The Director looked impatient. “I do not have time for your witticisms, Mister Holliday.”

Doc shrugged, nonchalant, as if a Black Badge agent weren’t pointing his own pistol at his heart. “I think that would be your loss, Director.”

“There’s too much thinking with this team.” The Director snapped, anger rising. Dolls watched him carefully, noting the way his nostrils flared, the bead of sweat dripping down his temple. “We cannot make an innocent civilian disappear. How do you think that would look? What if someone came looking for her?”

Dolls had to laugh at that. “No one’s going to look for her. I’ve reviewed her files; no permanent address for the last four years, no family—”

“ _Everyone_ has family, Agent Dolls.” The Director asserted. “And if you think she doesn’t, then you haven’t looked hard enough.”

The way he stood, the terseness in his words, made Dolls squint. Made him wonder.

“The civilian _will not_ be taken into custody, Agent Dolls.” The Director ordered finally. “Is that understood?”

_Click_.

The safety was removed from the pistol trained at Doc’s heart.

“Yes, Sir.” Dolls seethed through clenched jaws.

The Director’s lips twisted into a vindictive smile. “Good.” He lowered his gun, and his agent did the same, handing the pistol back to its owner at Dolls’ back. Doc holstered it angrily. “This agency has a vested interest in this civilian, Agent Dolls. Certainly more of an interest than we have in you.”

That was all he said, but still, the threat rang through, loud as if he had screamed it through a megaphone directly into Dolls’ ear: He was expendable, and _the civilian_ wasn’t. “Permission to ask why, Sir.”

The Director was silent for a moment, considering the gun still in his hand. He turned it over carefully. The way he looked at the trigger made urgency race a flash down Dolls’ spine. Doc, still pressed to his back, tensed as well, as if sensing his unease. His mistrust in the man he answered to.

“Everyone has family, Agent Dolls.” The Director repeated. “Family protects each other. Family provides strength, stability. Family weathers all storms, wouldn’t you say?”

“Who is her family, Sir?”

The Director slid his gun into the holster hidden beneath the jacket of his expensive suit. “Old adversaries of the Division.” He fixed Dolls with a hard gaze, eyes heavy with hidden messages. “ _Old_.” He left a beat of thick silence. Perhaps only for dramatic effect. Perhaps to replace words he wasn’t allowed to say. “Continue on with the mission at hand, Agent Dolls. The Cult of Bulshar continues to grow in numbers every day. They’re gearing up for something; I can feel it in my bones.”

He rolled his shoulders back for emphasis, as if working through a crick in the neck. Dolls bit back a sigh. “Yes, Sir.”

With that, the Director turned away, his agent following suit, and Dolls and his partner watched them go, disappearing around the mouth of the alley and into the night. He ran a stressed hand over his buzzed head, scrubbing at his neck as he thought. “Doc, you got Wi-Fi? My phone is dead.”

Doc looked at him like he’d grown a second head. “What in the silly sick is Wi-Fi?”

Dolls sighed. “Never mind. Just pass your phone.” Doc pressed the smartphone into his waiting hand, trusting him to know what he was doing. Or, at least, trusting him to know more about this “ _Wi-Fi_ ” than he did.

Pulling up Google Chrome—they did have Wi-Fi, from the café across the street that had no sign over the door but for a vague caricature of a cup of coffee—he looked up the operating hours of the nearest Service Canada office. The phone’s clock said it was just past one a.m., and the office didn’t open until nine on weekdays. He handed the phone back to Doc and motioned for him to follow. They crossed the street in silence, pushing into the coffee shop that, in a regular town, would have been closed in the middle of the night.

Here in Town, however, the perky waitress greeted them with a face-splitting grin and plastic menus, rattling off the night’s specials like the back of her hand.

Dolls barely heard them—the gears in his mind turned too loudly to hear anything over their squeaks and groans. He simply ordered a cup of coffee and a soup of the day, to go.

They had a long to-do list ahead of them. 

* * *

Trees fell from the sky, and everything bled back into place, back to where it all was the last time Nicole had been here, in this nightmare forest. She stood alone in the same small clearing of trees as she had before, feeling cold.

Alone.

The colours all around her were smudged, almost rubbed from existence completely. The bleak sunlight painted her skin ashen, sickly, as if it was leeching the very life from her veins.

“ _Hello?_ ” She called into the trees, and her voice rolled over like a wave, forward and then back to her again.

The hairs on the back of her neck raised half a second before she received an answer.

“Baby girl?” The same voice that was hollow, where it was full of life in Nicole’s memories, came back at her. She turned, slowly, almost afraid of what ghoul she might find waiting behind her.

Momma stood among the trees, and the greyness that touched everything else here didn’t seem to have any effect on her. Her dress was still a vibrant, haunting blue, still dripping wet into a small puddle beside her bare feet. Her hair was still the same shade of fiery red as her daughters, still matted with mud and leaves. Her eyes were still that same crystal blue they had been looking down at Nicole in her crib at night.

It was as if the air didn’t need to affect her, didn’t need to suck the life from her.

She was already dead.

There was no life left to take, not from her, not anymore.

Nicole’s voice shook as she answered. “How can you be here, Momma—where… where is _here_?”

Momma simply shrugged. “I don’t know, baby girl. It’s your bridge. You choose what it looks like.”

Nicole was confused. “My… my bridge? What does that mean?”

Madeline didn’t answer her, not right away. Instead, she began to move in a slow circle around the clearing, gazing at the trees in pensive silence. “You still have your tattoo, don’t you?”

Reflexively, Nicole reached up to rub her shoulder, nodding. “Of course, it’s—it’s permanent, Momma, and you told me I had to keep it forever. You said it would protect me.”

“It will, baby girl,” her Momma assured her, with almost half as much warmth to her words as she used to have when she was alive. “It will. It will just make this bridge more difficult to cross.”

“What do you—”

“Do you miss me, baby girl?” Her mother looked at her then, fixing Nicole with a gaze that was jarring, desperate and afraid. Afraid Nicole had forgotten her. Afraid she no longer needed her mother.

All at once, Nicole realized it wasn’t _loneliness_ that she felt settling in the air here, like ash after a volcanic explosion. It was the feeling of a piece being cut out from her. It was the feeling of _absence_ , of _missing_. It was the feeling of the Earth revolving around a single person who wasn’t there anymore.

Her eyes burned. “Of course,” she choked. “Of course I do.”

“Then I can stay, if you want?” Momma was closer to her now, perhaps only two steps away. Her skin was so pale; Nicole could almost see the veins underneath, spiderwebbing all around her body, lying dormant and useless now. There was no life left in her to circulate, to sustain. There was nothing but decay.

Still, she nodded, a small tear slipping free that had been caught in her eye since the funeral. “ _Please,_ ” she said, and her voice was only a hoarse whisper, cracking from the inside out, just like her. “Please don’t go, Momma.”

The smile that pulled at her Momma’s face was cruel, sickening and monstrous. “Never, baby girl.” She sat down on the grass, legs crossed, and Nicole followed suit. The grass was dry, coarse and brittle, as if it hadn’t rained here in a very long time. She threaded her fingers through it and held on, or else she thought she might have just spun right off the face of the Earth.

Her Momma looked at her with those cold, dead eyes, and Nicole was so, so afraid of her, but at the same time she couldn’t ask her to go. Not when it had been so long. Not when the last time she had seen that face, Nicole had been burying her.

“How have you been, baby girl?” Momma asked, and Nicole laughed wetly, wiping the tears from her face with the heel of her hand.

“It’s been tough, Momma.”

“Tell me everything.”

In the parched grass, her mother’s hands began to grow into roots that twisted and dug into the soil of the forest floor. 

* * *

The sky outside was dark when Nicole woke sometime past two in the morning. The room around her was dark, too, and it took her a moment to place that sound in her memory:

_Beep.               Beep.               Beep.               Beep._

It was a heart monitor.

Pain hit her all at once like a brick to the temple, and her head pounded as everything from the day before rushed back. She squeezed her eyes shut, holding her breath in. Only let in the steady beat of the heart monitor. Slowly, she let the breath out, but the pain stayed throbbing in her head.

Peeking her eyes open once more, she found this time there was a small light on in the room. A small lamp on the table beside Waverly’s bed.

A pair of hazel eyes watching her with concern.

“Are you all right?” Waverly whispered across the space between their beds. Her voice sounded hoarse, pained.

“You’re awake.” Nicole hoped she didn’t notice the deflection.

No dice. “Have been for a few hours. Are you all right?”

Nicole found all she could do was nod—or, nod as much as she could, with the bandages around her throat—and even that didn’t seem very convincing.

“Are you sure?” Waverly asked again. “You didn’t seem it.”

“I…” Nicole found herself at a loss for words, with Waverly looking at her like that. Like she was… _worried_ for Nicole. “Bad dream.”

Waverly frowned, then nodded. “You kept calling out.” She said, sounding almost guilty that she had heard it. “You were calling for your Momma.”

It was like the IV had suddenly switched to dripping ice in her veins. “Oh. Sorry.”

Waverly shook her head, earnest. “Don’t be. You sounded… sad.”

Nicole pressed her lips in a thin line, grave. The dream was already slipping away from her mind, the way dreams so often do in the light of the land of the waking. As if one can’t bring someone back with them, from that Other Place.

The look on her face was enough of an explanation for Waverly, apparently. Waverly twisted her head a bit more, careful not to move her ribs (she had learned the hard way what that felt like, when she awoke earlier). She rested a hand beneath her head, watching Nicole carefully. “Can I… Can I ask how she died?”

The question dropped like a pin in the silent room.

They were alone in the room, now—Wynonna had been ushered away in the evening before, by an orderly who insisted that yes, visiting hours _did_ in fact still apply to her—and Nicole couldn’t help but feel _bare_.

But Waverly looked at her so simply. So without malice. Only curiosity lit her soft face. Only a want to help, if Nicole would let her.

Nicole cleared her throat, wincing in the pain that brought.

(She made a mental note to ask the nurse for more pain meds, when she next checked on them).

“She… she was out driving one night, just driving. Picking up groceries.” Nicole laughed grimly at this. “Groceries for me, actually. We were supposed to be having dinner. To celebrate my making it six months on the force—that’s what I did, before I started bounty hunting, I was a police officer.” She answered the question before Waverly could ask it. Waverly nodded, and waited for her to continue.

The regret washed over her, unbidden, taking hold of her heart with cold hands, as poignant as it had been the day it happened. The regret, and with it, the grief, too.

“I told her she didn’t need to, but she insisted on making my favourite apple pie for dessert. But she didn’t have enough apples, see?” The tears built in her eyes, too. “And the grocery store is across a river, so you have to drive across this rickety old bridge to get to it.”

“Oh,” Waverly seemed to already know where this was going. She wished she could reach across the gap between them, hold Nicole’s hand, give her strength when she seemed so, so broken by the past. She wished she wasn’t trapped in this bed, trapped by her own body and her own pain, so that she could take some of Nicole’s away.

Another chuckle bubbled up in Nicole’s throat, and it ripped through the sinews of her cut flesh like Jack had his claws in her all over again. “Yeah, _oh_.” She wiped a tear away as it fell down her cheek. “I got to the house a bit early. Prepared the salad. I was just waiting for her to get back. Then I was waiting for _hours_. The chicken got cold. I think I left about a hundred messages on her phone before the police knocked at the door. They said… they said probably some drunken idiot had run her off the road. Into the river. She was trapped in her car. Person who did it was never caught.”

Waverly wasn’t sure what to say to that. Her own mother had died so long ago that she barely even remembered anything about her, besides a sad smile and a scared voice singing lullabies while she cried. But Nicole… Nicole had so many more memories than that. _Good_ memories. _Sweet_ memories. Memories that meant a lifetime, to her. Memories that had shaped her heart, held her hand, made her the person she was today. She had lost so much more than could ever be contained in the simple word _Mother_.

So instead, she took a deep breath, steeling her nerves and surveying the machines that wired her to her bed. Both her IV and her heart monitor were on wheels. Okay. She could do this.

(Why did she need to do this?)

( _Shut the fuck up, brain, that’s why._ )

Bracing herself for a moment, she shifted, pushed herself up into a sitting position. Fire ripped across her ribcage, the heart monitor picking up its pace as she breathed through the pain.

Nicole sat up, concern drawing her eyebrows in a crease, big doe eyes watching her in confusion. “Wave—”

“ _Just_.” Waverly hissed through bared teeth, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. The floor was cool against the pads of her feet. Cold, refreshing. She felt like a newborn foal, taking its first shaking steps out into the big, wide world. Softer this time, she said, “Just… give me a second.”

Bracing both hands on the machines that guarded her, she used them as crutches to push herself up, squeezing her eyes shut against the aching in her chest, her head.

_One foot._

_One foot in front of the other._

The first step was shaky, the second less so, the third that brought her to Nicole’s bedside laboured. Her hands shook where they held the machines, blanching knuckles gripping the poles so tightly she thought she might leave dents.

Nicole sat up, legs swinging over the side of her bed, holding hands out to catch Waverly, if need be. “Wave—get back into bed.” It wasn’t a question.

Waverly glared sharply at her, determination in gritted teeth. “Just move over, dumbass.” She seethed.

Nicole swallowed, uncertain, but shuffled over, making more than enough room beside her. Waverly all but collapsed onto the bed, slouching, breathing hard, muscles shaking, aching, with too much exertion too soon. It took a few seconds for the heart monitor to quiet down to its regular pace.

_Beep.               Beep.               Beep.               Beep._

Nicole was silent for a few seconds longer. “You should get back in your own bed, you need rest.”

Waverly didn’t even look at her as she leaned over, rested her weary head on Nicole’s shoulder. She felt Nicole tense beneath her, stiff as a board and still as a statue, breath sucked in and held, arms clamped in tight to the sides of her body, as if she was terrified of letting them get too close to Waverly. Still, she didn’t tell Waverly to move. Still, her heartbeat matched the one played out on the monitor.

Waverly let her eyes close, shuffling a little closer, resting her head at a more comfortable angle. She was shorter than Nicole by nearly a whole head, and it was as if they had been made to be the perfect height for this. To fit together so perfectly like this. “Thank you,” she whispered, because it would have felt too much like shattering the night to have spoken any louder than the barest of whispers. “For saving my life.”

Nicole sputtered. “I… I didn’t really—”

“ _Yes_ , you did.” Waverly asserted. “You did. Jack had me, and then you…” She shook her head, the thought not worth dwelling on.

(It rose in her mind, anyway.)

(The flashes of falling, the _cracks_ her ribs made when she landed, the feeling of a hand closing around her throat, and closing and closing and _closing_ ).

(The streak of red, and the freedom it brought. The safety. The pain.)

(The words she heard, but didn’t understand, not yet.)

( _Prophetess._ )

She let out a long breath through her nose. “Just… thank you.”

“Well, who would I be, if I let a pretty girl die on my watch?” She sounded cocky, but only on the surface. Her words were strained, high-strung. Scared, even. She really had been afraid for Waverly’s life, maybe.

Maybe she was just afraid of this, right now. Of Waverly sitting so close, thanking her. Of the darkness around them, the quietness, the aloneness. Of Waverly sitting with her eyes closed, the both of them dressed only in paper-thin hospital gowns, completely defenseless and without any pretense left in them.

Maybe she was just afraid of what it could mean, if she let it mean anything at all.

“And they say chivalry is dead,” Waverly chuckled, bringing a hand to rest on Nicole’s forearm, and she felt Nicole tense beneath her again—not an unwelcome tension, simply a scared tension. A stray dog not used to being petted so caringly. It made her want to wrap Nicole up in all her limbs, hug her with her whole body, hold her until Nicole stopped being scared that someone was going to hurt her.

Nicole said nothing in response, and the room lapsed in silence for another moment before Waverly opened her eyes, looking at her hand on Nicole’s forearm. She began to trace small circles there with her thumb, calloused finger pad scraping lightly against soft skin. Gooseflesh sprang up following her path. “I’m sorry about your mother,” she said.

“Me, too,”

“Why did you stop being a cop?”

For a second, she thought she had asked one question too many, that Nicole would tell her that was enough, and she couldn’t push any further. But then Nicole let out a sad, slow breath, flipping over her forearm beneath Waverly’s hand so that Waverly could trace small patterns on the inside, the softer, more delicate skin. It was something small—so small—but it was something. It was the simplest of gestures, the tiniest of steps toward walking out the door, but it felt like she was saying, _Here. Take this. I can give you this little piece of me, at least._

“After Momma died, I… I had no idea what I was doing.” She began, voice hoarse. Though, Waverly wasn’t sure if that was from the wounds in her neck or the ones in her heart. “I was 23 and trying to organize my mother’s funeral. Do you know how much goes into planning a funeral? So much. You have to choose flower arrangements and coffins and—” She shook her head, willing the tears away. _Praying_ them away. She took another deep breath. “My grandmother, she helped as much as she could, but. It was mostly left up to me. We hadn’t heard from my dad since he left, and I was her next of kin, so it was all left to me. And afterward, I tried to get back to my life before, but… it’s like there’s this clear, definitive line in my life, right on that day, that _second_ that those cops told me Momma was dead. There’s _Before_ , when I wanted to be a cop, to _help_ people. When I had this amazing girlfriend who I thought might love me forever, and my own apartment, and a great job, and I was _happy_.

“And then there’s _After_ , when all of that was shattered. I couldn’t look at my girlfriend the same way anymore, didn’t want to go back to work and deal with cases exactly like mine, because now I knew Momma had her own casefile somewhere in the system, in the unsolved homicides pile, just waiting on someone’s desk to be put in a cabinet. The thought of staying in one place too long made my skin crawl. I couldn’t… I couldn’t even look at Nana too long, anymore. She looked _so_ much like Momma, but Momma was never going to get that old. So I… I just started running, I guess. Just going.”

Waverly drew her fingers down the length of Nicole’s forearm, and a shiver escaped Nicole, a long, shaking breath of release, like she hadn’t even realized how much she had missed such familiarity, such simple touch as this. Waverly slipped her hand into Nicole’s, entwining their fingers, rubbing a thumb over the back of her hand.

Nicole’s voice was even quieter, as she continued, like she was afraid to spook Waverly. “I haven’t seen Nana since the day after Momma’s funeral. Haven’t seen any of my family, in fact.”

“Don’t they live around here?” Waverly asked.

“Yeah, about… twenty minutes from here, I think?” Nicole said. “The Baile boarders the Thompson farm. That’s why Greg and I used to play in Pendle Forest.”

Waverly scrunched up her eyebrows. “The Baile?”

“Oh, it’s—it’s just this name we use for Nana’s farm. It’s Irish Gaelic, it means—”

“ _Home_.”

Nicole couldn’t help but be impressed by that. “Exactly.”

Waverly hummed, and Nicole practically melted into the sensation, leaning her cheek down to rest on the top of Waverly’s head, shoulders drooping just a bit, strings of tension cut in her exhausted muscles. “Do they know you’re here?”

Nicole was silent for a moment. “No, no… they think I’m still up north, where I was before…”

Waverly bit her lip before asking the next question. “Do you think you’ll go see them?”

Nicole swallowed thickly. “I don’t know.”

Waverly nodded. “Okay.”

Waverly didn’t know how long they sat like that, curved around one another, hand in hand, living in the silence of the night, watching the stars out the window. She didn’t know how long it took for her eyes to begin to shut once more, lulled by the steady sound of Nicole’s breathing by her ear. She didn’t know when Nicole had shifted them, carefully, scooping her up into strong arms that would never, ever hurt her, laying her on a pillow that smelled like disinfectant and, distantly, something like the perfume of Nicole’s shampoo. All she knew was that her dreams were filled with vanilla dipped doughnuts.

When the nurse came to check their vitals a few hours later, just before the sun began to rise, she found them both asleep in Nicole’s bed, hands still entwined, Nicole’s face turned to Waverly’s as if chasing her across the pillow they shared. The nurse sighed and checked her watch.

_Twenty more minutes, Greta_ , she thought as she left the room, making a detour to the breakroom for another cup of coffee. _Twenty more minutes on shift, and then you don’t have to deal with any of_ that _shit._

* * *

Nicole had been awake for about fifteen minutes now, and she had been panicking for a solid fourteen of them.

Panicking because she woke up next to Waverly, in her ( _their?_ ) hospital bed. Panicking because their fingers were still wound together like lines of poetry. Panicking, because Waverly looked so _beautiful_ as she slept, so _peaceful_ and _innocent_. Panicking, because for the first minute after waking up, she hadn’t been panicking at all.

She had been at peace. She had laid there, listening to the soft sounds of Waverly breathing, in through her nose and out through her pretty mouth that hung open just slightly. She had almost felt like this one minute had been written in the stars: She’d wake up and smile and she wouldn’t remember, just for that one single minute, everything that had gone wrong. She wouldn’t be able to remember all she had lost. She would only remember that Waverly was heartachingly beautiful, and that she snored, just softly. And it would be wonderful.

But then the clock would tick on, passing the 12 once more, and the minute would be over, and everything would crash into her all at once, and she’d _panic._

And _fuck_ , if that’s what the stars had written out for her, they could go fuck themselves for ruining that one minute.

Because she felt comfortable here. She felt truly peaceful. For the first time since her mother had died and she’d started a mad chase across the country, after criminals and away from her past, she felt she could truly rest her weary bones here.

With Waverly, maybe. If she’d allow.

One minute of peace and fourteen minutes of panic later, and Waverly’s eyes fluttered open. She blinked the sleep from her vision, rubbing an eye, and settled her head back into the pillow, shuffling closer to the warm body beside her, humming with contentment.

God, she was _not_ making this easy.

“Mornin’,” she mumbled against Nicole’s shoulder, and Nicole could feel the soft smile that pulled at her lips.

“Morning,” Nicole whispered back, mouth turning into a desert, which she told herself was just a result of the stab wounds.

Not the way the soft morning sunlight was streaming in through the window, colouring Waverly’s hair into spun gold and copper. Nor the way she had moved so close in her sleep, seeking out the warmth Nicole emitted, grasping for more closeness than Nicole had had in a long, _long_ time. Nor the way Nicole wanted to give it to her, the closeness she sought out, the warmth she craved when she was asleep and incapable of consciously craving anything at all.

No, it was the stab wounds, obviously.

“Sorry, I kinda stole your bed.” Waverly said, a little bit of a laugh in her voice that Nicole couldn’t help but emulate.

“No, it’s fine,” she said. “Kept me from having any more bad dreams.”

Waverly nodded, satisfied with that answer. “I do my best to scare the monsters away.” The hand in hers squeezed tighter. “If… if you want me to?”

There was a question there that Nicole didn’t think she was quite ready to answer just yet.

_Do you want me to scare your monsters away?_

_Do you want me to stay?_

_Do you want me?_

So she settled for the comment that wasn’t quite so scary to make. “The monsters don’t stand a chance against you, Wave.”

“Damn right they don’t,” she held up an arm and flexed her bicep, and though it was only half-hearted, half-asleep and weak, Nicole was glad they were lying down because her knees went weak.

_Good God, this girl is perfect_.

They were silent for a moment more, simply watching one another. Waverly watched Nicole’s eyes focus in and out, wondering what she was doing, what the world looked like through her eyes, what she saw when she looked at Waverly like _that_. Nicole looked at Waverly and let her eyes find that string of the Underneath, and pulled it back again and again, revelling in the Sight that appeared beneath. Revelling in the light that shone from Waverly’s smile and the practical _halo_ that twinkled above her. The light rolled off Waverly in waves like rays of sunshine, and it filled Nicole to the brim, finding each and every crack inside her and lighting up the night that had existed there without end for _so_ long. It made her ache when she’d let her eyes fall back out of focus, like a bad knee that acted up when the weather was just beginning to turn, and she’d find the light again.

Then Waverly took in a deep breath through her nose, closing her eyes and settling back into Nicole’s side. “You know what? I’m just gonna use my veto power right now. Dolls isn’t allowed to arrest you; I don’t want to have to get up ever.”

Nicole laughed. “Well, you’re not gonna get any complaints from me, but I’m not sure Dolls will take that as a viable excuse.”

“Mmm… Tough nuggets. He should have thought about all the soft pillows in the world.”

“Oh, is _that_ all I am, now? Just a pillow?”

“Did you think I’d keep you around for your personality or something?”

“Well,” Nicole teased, pretending to consider a thought deeply. “I suppose not, but Wynonna _did_ mention something about my ass being ‘ _top-shelf_ ’? Unless she’s the one that likes it, not you?”

Nicole could feel the flush spread across Waverly’s face, where it was pressed against her arm. “Oh.” she squeaked, her voice high with embarrassment. “Oh, she mentioned that, did she?”

Nicole reached a hand up to scratch behind her ear, the movement coming without thought, like a term of endearment they had been using for years and years already. “Yeah, she did.”

“Good to know,” she cleared her throat, trying to hold herself back from chasing after the warm hand behind her ear. “On a completely unrelated note, I’m gonna kill my sister later.”

Nicole chuckled, because she had no doubt in her mind that Waverly could kill someone, if she really wanted, and she could get away with it, too. “All right, cutie, just tell me where to meet you with the getaway van.”

The term of endearment slipped past her lips before she could even think of it—as if someone had placed it in her mind without her knowledge. Waverly’s smile faltered, taken by surprise. She blinked, dumbfounded. “’ _Cutie_ ’?”

“Yes, sweetie pie?” Nicole held her breath, praying to whoever was out there that Waverly would buy her easy demeanour and blasé expression, that she wouldn’t see past the plastic confidence to the child beneath who was terrified she had just _royally_ fucked up.

Waverly watched her for a moment, eyes scrutinizing her up and down, as if trying to decide whether or not to push it. She apparently decided not to, or she really didn’t notice that Nicole was screaming on the inside (which, Nicole would admit later on, was pretty well impossible; Waverly knew everything, especially when it pertained to her) because she just smiled and shook her head, rolling her eyes. “Nothing,” she said in a flat voice.

“Right, well,” Nicole said, disentangling her arm from where it had wound around Waverly’s in the night. “As much as I’ve enjoyed our little pillow talk, I should get changed. I think they’re discharging me soon.”

She tried not to look at Waverly as she extracted her leg from beneath the one that had been thrown over it, bare toes tucked beneath her calf for warmth. If she had, she might have seen the disappointment in Waverly’s eyes, softened in the morning light. She might have seen the little pout that pulled at Waverly’s lips.

(Though, thankfully, she didn’t see _that_ , because if she had, she would have been absolutely helpless, she just knew it.)

Instead, she just collected her clothes from the bedside table and retreated into the safety of the bathroom. The second the lock clicked into place, she sighed, leaning her forehead against the door and shutting her eyes. “Fuck,” she whispered to the shadows who didn’t even care, anyway. “Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.” 

* * *

Three days later found Nicole asleep in her own bed, lost in a dream world that was starting to look for and more like Pendle Forest, behind the Thompson farm. Momma had called to her, every night for the past three nights, like clockwork. She’d fall asleep and the trees would fall into place and then there would be Momma, smiling, calling her _baby girl_ and telling Nicole how proud she was of her.

And it was _nice_.

It was nice, having Momma back, even just like this. Even just as a shade, a figment of her own sad imagination. It was something. She’d take every second of it she could get.

But tonight it was cut short, interrupted.

Tonight, hands grabbed her from her sleep, cruel and angry, and they dragged her to the floor, blindfolding her and binding her hands behind her back, just like last time.

But this time angry fingers dug into the still-healing wounds in her neck as they led her out of her apartment and into a car she couldn’t see, drove her to a destination she didn’t know, and threw her into someplace cold and dangerous she didn’t trust.

This time, there were no threats thrown at her, no directives given, not a single word spoken, not from the guards. This time, she could _Feel_ something wrong in the air. This time, their silence, their stoicism, it scared the shit out if her. It was worse than having their guns crack her in the head. It was worse than the abuse, the kicking and punching and bruising and _hurting_. She could anticipate all that, and it would heal, eventually.

But this… _thing_ that sat in the air a she knelt on a cold, damp concrete floor, it was more sinister. It was the thing that happened after you ignored the warning label.

Heels _clicked_ toward her on the concrete floor, and she heard a gun being cocked. Its barrel pressed into the underside of her chin. “Good morning, Nicole,” the Wolf Woman said, sickly sweet and deranged, and Nicole put her finger exactly on what was in the air: It was the whelp, finally freed from its trap. Feral and out for blood. “I think it’s time we had a little  _chat_." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hiya! Sorry for the longish wait; this chapter was giving me heck, and then I got super sick and needed a bit to recuperate. But here it is! The italicized lines at the beginning are lines from Book 1 of John Milton's _Paradise Lost_ , if you're unfamiliar with it because you are, unlike me, _not_ a huge idiot who took Brit Lit as a "fun" elective. (Actually, I really loved this course, it was just a bitch.) Anyway, in this excerpt, Milton is describing Hell when Lucifer and his demons first arrive there. 
> 
> Hope y'all enjoyed it. Things are really starting to brew, now! Nicole and Waves are dumb gay shits. Dolls trusts nobody, not even Nobody. Doc is vaguely confused about most things (same). Wynonna is an overprotective teddy bear with a gun. 
> 
> Come talk to me on tumblr [@astrophysical-bean](http://astrophysical-bean.tumblr.com/) (yeah, I finally learned how to insert links in html). I'm always down to talk about literally anything! Ask me questions! Send me a message! I'm just a dumb lesbian who loves science. I am literally the least intimidating person ever. My nickname is literally Bean. Who could be scared of someone like that? 
> 
> Leave a comment or a kudos or tell your friends to read this, I dunno! BIG thank you to everyone who already has, you motivate me to keep going when writer's block is being mean. (Also, if anyone wants to volunteer to be a beta reader, I would love you forever, like you for always, and as long as I'm living, my beta you'd be. Please, it was so hard writing this on my own). 
> 
> Until next time! --Bean


	5. The Drunk Pig Owner Who Designs the Cosmos

If she was being honest, Nicole was getting _really fucking tired_ of having a gun shoved into her face every other day—twice before Fridays.

The one currently being  _literally_  shoved into the underside of her chin was just another cherry on top of the Fuck You Sundae, really. Nicole had to hold in her deep sigh, but the sarcastic comment slipped out before she could bite it back. “Morning,” she said. “How’ve you been? Work going okay, family’s all well? You never just call to chat anymore.”

The Wolf Woman scowled, and the barrel of the gun cut into her chin even more. She flinched, throat closing. “Do you _always_ have to make a joke?”

“Well if I don’t, then who will? It’s a job I hold with the utmost responsibility, ma’am.”

There was a pause, and Nicole could almost imagine the Wolf Woman pinching the bridge of her nose in frustration. She smirked. “Why am I here, anyway? You said for me to call when I had something.”

“And then I got impatient,” the Wolf Woman replied. “I heard about your… _accident_ the other day.” Nicole felt a hand at her throat, lifting her up by the chin and poking at the healing wounds on her neck. She flinched; they were still tender, even if the bandages had already been taken off to let them heal in the open air. 

“Tree-climbing competition,” Nicole said, repeating the story they had fed the hospital, too. “Got too competitive.”

The Wolf Woman chuckled. “You know, you’re a lot bolder than people give you credit for, Nicole. Lying to me when I could kill you in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t even feel bad about it if I did, you know. I could just…” A _click_ rang in her ears as the safety was flicked off the gun. “ _Press_ one little trigger, and… _bang_. How fun.”

Nicole’s stomach turned at the sick delight in her voice. She was _enjoying_ this; threatening Nicole, toying with the idea of killing her as easily as blinking. Blood pumped in her ears, and she tried not to let her voice quiver. “You wouldn’t kill your own spy.”

Again, the Wolf Woman chuckled. “What, do you think you have any kind of leverage here? I’d just replace you with someone else. You’re _nothing_ in this. You’re just a tool. And sweetie, there are plenty of other hammers at the hardware store. Now.” The hand that was at her throat moved up and dug its claws into her hair, yanking her head back roughly. She yelped, pain stabbing at her scalp. “You have a _job_ to do, Haught.”

It’s amazing how enough fear and adrenaline can make the beats between seconds feel like eons, like the clock is stuck between the _tick_ and the _tock_. Nicole’s breathing slowed, heartbeat thundering in her ears with an eerily dilatory pace, and the thoughts dripped into her mind slow as molasses.

She was a tool, sure—nothing more than the hammer with which the Wolf Woman could drive the final nails into someone’s coffin—but that didn’t matter, not to her. The Wolf Woman was right; she could just find another hammer.

But this world, as far as Nicole was concerned, could not find another Waverly.

(Because it _was_ Waverly who flashed in her mind, bright and vivid and smiling like the dawn and it made Nicole’s heart ache.)

She might be expendable, but Waverly wasn’t.

Wynonna wasn’t, nor was Dolls, nor Nedley, nor anyone else she had met in this town. These were _people_. They had _lives_ and _families_ and _homes_. Nicole didn’t. She didn’t have any of those things. Not like they did.

Sure, she had some family left— _technically_ , even if she hadn’t seen them in four years, and had spent most of those years blatantly lying to them about her life and where she was, so that she could continue avoiding them in order to continue avoiding her desperate fear of losing them. She had lost them, anyway. She had let her familial bonds crumble to dust in her hands.

Time froze to a standstill as everything she had once had flashed in her mind, bright as if they were only just happening, a tableau unfurling right before her blindfolded eyes.

She and Greg as teenagers, the two of them helping Nana to cook breakfast every morning as the sun rose over the Baile, before they went to work in the fields with Uncle Jacob and Aunt Abby. Spending days with the sun beating down on them, burning the tip of her nose, and Greg would tease her that maybe she wouldn’t get so burnt if she didn’t insist on always wearing her baseball cap backwards.

Helping Aunt Maura bake pies in the evening, learning how to knead dough in silence, as Maura rarely spoke, and when she did it was in a hushed voice, barely more than a breeze in the curtains, and it taught Nicole how to really _listen_.

Meeting Bea, Greg’s little sister, for the very first time, when she was five, and promising to do everything she ever could to protect that precious little soul for the rest of her life.

Standing back to back with Greg in the playground, fighting off bullies when they would tease Nicole for having red, red hair and knobby knees. The scrapes and bruises they would get, and Aunt Maura scolding them for fighting again, but they would just hold their heads high, chins jutted out in pride at the fact that they had not backed down.

Greg learning to fight the bullies on his own when they grew older and Nicole walked hand in hand with a girl for the very first time in town, and the teasing became slurs, words of hate thrown with malice, meant to destroy.

Momma sitting her down at the kitchen table one day, when she was four, and explaining that she was going to stay with some people for the summer—that Nicole should trust them, because they were always going to look out for her, no matter what. In retrospect, Nicole would realize that her mother meant _no matter what I did to them, they will always accept you_.

On the other hand, there was Waverly.

Waverly texting her every day since she was released from the hospital, asking how she was feeling. Sent her offhand updates like ‘ _Wynonna is making me soup – send help!!_ ’ And ‘ _Thesis advisor doesn’t seem to give a rat’s shit I just got out the hospital, I still have to be in Calgary to meet with him today. Don’t worry though, Jeremy has this awesome Icelandic healing spell xx How are you?_ ’ Always coming back around to asking how Nicole was.

Waverly smiling like the sun coming up underground and asking every morning if she had had any nightmares the night before.

Calling her every night when Nicole found she couldn’t sleep, too restless not knowing whether she was going to be arrested or not, whether she was going to be kidnapped or not, whether she was safe to fall asleep or not. They would simply lie in bed, a town apart, and Nicole would listen to Waverly chatter on about history and her master’s thesis and how overbearing Wynonna could be when she was hurt but how much she just couldn’t find it in herself to be angry with her sister for it. She had taken to falling asleep like that, with Waverly’s voice filling her head with an aching sweetness that she wasn’t sure how to hold in her hands without breaking it just yet.

Not making her ask for any of this—any of the attentiveness, the sweetness—simply offering it all up to her willingly, in an unspoken acknowledgement of the fact that Nicole couldn’t fall asleep without it anymore. Sure, she didn’t understand all that Nicole had lost, but she tried to help anyway. And, though she would never say it, Nicole was starting to think she needed all this, too.

Even after three days, she was not expendable, not to Nicole.

Not with this _Feeling_ that bloomed in her chest when she thought about giving in, betraying Waverly and the small amount of trust they had garnered between them in the short time they had known one another.

Still, there was everything she needed to protect, even if she hadn’t seen her family since the day after Momma’s funeral.

The devil and the deep blue sea were crashing in on her, and she was caught between them; caught between betraying one or the other, hurting one or the other, _losing_ one or the other.

But then again, what if she just let both of them crush her, from both sides? What if she just let the devil drive his pitchfork into her while the deep blue sea filled her lungs to the brim? What if she let both these things destroy her? She wasn’t the important thing here, they were.

She gritted her teeth as the clock ticked on and time found its old pace once again, and spoke, surprising even herself with how steady her voice was. “ _Go to hell_.”

The hand that was wound in her hair released its viselike grip just long enough for the Wolf Woman to rip the blindfold off her face. Nicole blinked, stunned by the bright lights of the warehouse after so long in the dark. The Wolf Woman knelt in front of her, face only inches from her own, ungodly rage all over her face. Her jaw was clenched, knuckles white around the grip of her gun still biting into Nicole’s chin. Her nails dug into Nicole’s scalp so deeply that Nicole was pretty sure she was drawing blood.

Five guards stood around them in a ring, clothed in all-black unmarked military gear and carrying assault rifles across their chests, bodies stiff and unmoving, unblinking. It was as if they didn’t even notice Nicole and the Wolf Woman in the center of their formation. As if they had no empathy left in them at all.

“You don’t get to _choose_ whether or not you work for me, Nicole.” The Wolf Woman seethed, her voice deathly quiet. “This isn’t a _partnership_. There’s no equality here. I tell you to do something and you do it so that I don’t _put a bullet in your fucking brain_ , understand?”

Nicole coughed, the gun beginning to cut off her airway. “Then do it. Fucking kill me already, because I am not your gopher.”

Fury flashed white hot across her face, and Nicole felt the butt of the gun whip across her cheek before she could even hear the _crunch_ or see the flash of silver. Her head snapped to the side as pain exploded across half of her face and stars danced across the backs of her eyes, the ground seeming to turn on its side and flatten, tilting dangerously as her vision blacked for a second. It came back, slowly, with a ringing in her ears. She stretched her jaw, ears popping, blood dripping from the cut on her cheek and the corner of her mouth where she’d bitten her tongue.

“See, that’s funny, Nicole, because _you are_.” The Wolf Woman said, tapping the barrel of her gun against Nicole’s temple as if she were tapping her finger on a table in thought. “And I can’t figure out why you’re not doing as I say. I thought we had a deal, and now you’re going back on it; that’s not a very good business practice. So what is it? Did you move here and figure, what? You could just forget about me and I’d forget about you? I’d just let you go on living your pathetic little life here? You could just keep working with X and his cronies, and I wouldn’t care?” _‘X’?_ Nicole thought, distantly. _Who the fuck would call Dolls ‘X’?_ “Did you figure you’d finally found your home here? Maybe get back together with your family, have a big Brady Bunch reunion? Settle down, get married, have a couple kids, and live happily ever after, the end?”

Nicole’s jaw clenched, though it made her face ache to do so. A sick smile spread across the Wolf Woman’s face, and she actually _laughed_. “That’s it, isn’t it? You actually think you might have found a place here.” She threw her head back and laughed loudly. “God, you _fucking_ _idiot_. You don’t belong here, Nicole. You don’t belong anywhere except an unmarked grave on the side of the highway. Do you know why? And feel free to check if I’m lying by the way. Go ahead, get inside my mind, tell me if I’m lying.”

Despite everything in her screaming not to, Nicole found the string that held the Wolf Woman’s Underneath back, and followed it, letting herself slip into the Sight of her as a damaged fox in a henhouse, limping and dangerous. But there was an aspect of sincerity to it: It was a feral thing, and if you went near it, it would only be your fault when you got hurt. It was honest about the fact that it wanted to kill you. It didn’t pretend to be anything other than the monster it was. 

The Wolf Woman leaned in closer to her, nose just inches from her face now. “You are _nothing_ , Nicole Haught. You have nothing, you deserve nothing, and you’re just a waste of space and food. They don’t care about you; Dolls, Wynonna, even that perky little sister of hers—what’s her name again?”

Rage began to shake her bones as she growled, “Waverly.”

The Wolf Woman nodded. “She doesn’t care about you, either. None of them do. Not even your family cares about you. Your grandmother doesn’t try to contact you—and I mean, really, she’s a psychic. You really think she doesn’t know you’re in the Ghost River Triangle? She knows everything. That’s why they call her _Bean an tí_ , isn’t it? Because she’s the strongest psychic in this entire dumbass county? You know she already knows everything, and yet she doesn’t try to help you. Because _she doesn’t care about you_. Because you have _no one_.”

Nicole felt light, buzzing with fear. “I don’t care,” she said, voice cracking. “I don’t care. They don’t deserve it. I’m not being your spy.”

The Wolf Woman smirked, twisted and angry. “Then everything that happens from this moment on will be _your fault_.”

The nails peeled themselves from her scalp, and the gun was retracted from her face, as the Wolf Woman stood, dusting off the pants of her impeccable suit. She looked down at Nicole on the floor like Nicole was nothing more than a bug to crush beneath her shoe. “I gave you a chance, Nicole. And you failed. Now you’re going to lose everything.”

This time, they didn’t cut the ties around her wrists. The guards around her simply loaded themselves into the unmarked van they had driven her here in, the Wolf Woman taking her place in the passenger’s seat up front, and then with a screeching of tires on concrete, they were gone, and Nicole was alone.

This time, she didn’t look around. She didn’t care.

She stayed kneeling on the floor, pajama pants dampening in the cold, muscles shaking, face pulsing with pain, and she let the tears fall. 

* * *

This warehouse was about five miles out of town, and she had no idea what time it was, but it was still pitch dark by the time she left, setting out toward the lights of the town in the distance. The dirt road cut into the soles of her bare feet, and the night’s chill bit into the exposed skin of her arms—she had only worn thin pajama pants and a tank top to bed that night. She at least thanked whoever was looking down at her from the sky that she had worn a sports bra to bed; it helped to keep at least _some_ warmth in her chest.

Her arms felt tired where they strained behind her, still bound by the plastic ties that were cutting into the skin of her wrists, and with every step toward town she thought she was getting closer and closer to collapsing. She kept her eyes trained on the road beneath her toes, counting steps, trying to keep her mind off of the Wolf Woman’s threats.

_One-two. One-two. One-two._

_Your-fault. Your-fault. Your-fault_.

_Lose-everything. Lose-everything. Lose-everything._

The stars twinkled above her, and she couldn’t help but want to spit at them.

She didn’t believe in a _God_ , capital G, per se. But she could not say that she herself was of this world, not entirely. She was very well accustomed to the fact that there are some things science just cannot explain, try as it always might. And she knew, more than even some other Seers, that everything in this Universe happens by design. Whether or not there was some Great Cosmic Architect planning that design was something she had given up wondering long ago; arguing that was best left up to the philosophers, and not a cynical woman in rainbow unicorn pajama pants who had nothing left inside.

Sometimes it seemed like there was, though. Sometimes it felt like there was a drunk old sadist up there, encouraging his equally drunk pet pig to decide what would happen next.

And if this was the way that pig had decided her life should go, then she’d turn it into bacon herself.

She needed a plan. Yes, that was what she needed. She needed to find a way to protect everyone, no matter the cost. Tiredness seeped into every part of her. Into her muscles, from the strain of the beatings. Into her blood and bones, that screamed at her that Something Was Coming. Into her mind, that was wracked with memories pulling themselves up out of the dregs of her consciousness, reminding her of all she had put on the line here. Into her heart, that ached where it had been torn at by everything she had done wrong.

Still, she kept her head level. She _had_ to keep herself steady. Now was not the time to be losing it.

She needed a plan, and she needed one _now_.

She could go to the Baile, tell Nana everything, tell them all to prepare, but even if they could prepare, what could they do against the Wolf Woman and her mercenaries? They were just a household of Seers. They could probably tell _when_ they would be attacked, but that was about it, and the future was unavoidable anyway. Just because they could See an attack coming doesn’t meant they could change it. Changing the outcome was impossible.

She could find Dolls, tell _him_ everything and ask for the BBD’s help, but where would that land her? She was already on the BBD’s shit list, and this would only seal her coffin. There’s no way they’d let her get away, if they knew she had meant to betray them. Would they even believe her? It’s not like she had much proof about anything that had happened. All she had was cuts and bruises and a stupid dossier on Dolls that could have come from anywhere. She could have made it herself, for all they knew.

Once again, she cursed her own shit luck that she had ended up with only a stupid parlour trick of an inherited gift. Being a human lie detector was absolutely fucking _useless_ when she already knew the Wolf Woman was telling the truth about taking everything away from her. She needed to _find_ this woman and _stop her_ , not give her a fucking Cosmo magazine personality quiz.

Tires crunching on the dirt road roused her from her bitter musings, and she moved to the side of the lane, just into the tall grass beside it, hoping it would give her some sort of cover. A dusty red Jeep was driving away from town, its bright high beams slicing through the darkness and making Nicole flinch when they dawned on her. She ducked down lower in the grass, willing whoever it was to just drive on beside her.

Instead, she heard breaks squeal and tires come to a stop just a few feet from her. She slunk down even lower, pressing back into the grass, ignoring the way it made her skin itch. Crickets chirped beside her ears, and something crawled across her foot, but she stood still and silent as a ghost, as the driver’s side door opened, and someone climbed out.

“Hello?” A voice called into the darkness, and Nicole’s blood ran like ice. She turned her eyes up to the sky, just for a moment, rage burning bright in her stomach, melting the ice in her veins in a flash. _Whoever is up there making all this happen, I will personally fight you barehanded and I will win because **fuck you**_.

“Is someone there?” Waverly called again, moving toward the crop of grass where Nicole knelt. “I can see you in the bushes. Are you hurt?”

It was everything Nicole could do to not throw up right there in the grass. Slowly, muscles screaming in protest, she stood, shoulders hunched and head low, trying to block her face.

Waverly stopped a foot from the grass, concern drawing her pretty face into a fret. “Who are you?” She asked, her voice soft but cautious. Nicole noted something held in her hand. A crowbar, it looked like. Just in case. Nicole couldn’t help but smile at that. She was so smart, it made Nicole’s heart hurt. “Do you need help?”

_Yes_.

She lifted her head, delicately, ashamed at the state Waverly had found her in.

Ashamed at the state she had allowed herself to be backed into.

Shock, then horror, then confusion ran across Waverly’s face as she registered what she was seeing: Nicole, beaten and bloody, hiding in the grass alongside the road in the middle of the night, in her pajamas, tear tracts running down her face in the dirt that covered her from head to toe, looking like she was seconds away from passing out.

The crowbar slipped from slack fingers and clattered to the ground, dinging off rocks in the dirt. “Oh my…”

Hands reached out toward Nicole, gentle and unthreatening, but Nicole still flinched, drawing away.

Afraid.

She pulled back a bit, keeping her hands up in surrender, trying to make Nicole see she wasn’t a threat. She just wanted to help. “Nicole…” she said, her voice soft.

( _So soft, so soft, so achingly soft that it hit Nicole like a battering ram_.)

Nicole wanted nothing more than to melt into her voice, but she was frozen in the grass, her flight instinct winning out over even her instinct to let Waverly be near. “Please,” she said, and her voice was a whisper in the darkness, broken and weak. She tried again. “Please don’t… I don’t… They’re going to hurt you, if you’re close to me. I can’t…” She shook her head, then groaned, the ground swaying dangerously beneath her as fresh pain clawed its way into every inch of her body.

“Who?” Waverly asked, taking a slow step forward, which Nicole mirrored in a step back. “Who’s going to hurt me? Why are your hands tied behind your back?”

“ _Please_ —” She begged, panic rising in her chest and wracked with sobs that clenched at her lungs like the Wolf Woman had curled her claws around them, too.

All at once, it felt like any resolve she had had left within her was gone, shattered into a million pieces that slipped through her fingers like sand in an hourglass, and all she was left with was a deep-seated panic that scraped her insides bloody and raw.

Waverly stepped closer again, now into the grass, and she stepped back, a sharp rock cutting into the instep of her foot. “Please don’t—I can’t be seen with you—they’re—they’re going to hurt you—I’m so sorry—and I can’t—I _can’t_ —”

With each step back as Waverly stepped forward, her voice became more and more shrill, terror cloying at her senses, distorting what she saw in the darkness. The shadows rose around her, trees twisting into monsters with claws outstretched, ready to tear her limb from limb for being the useless beast she was. For betraying the trust of someone like Waverly. For endangering her family. For everything she had done wrong. For everything she was about to bring down on them because she was just so _fucking useless at everything and the Wolf Woman is right, I’m a waste of space, I’m worthless, I’m nothing nothing nothing_ —

She tripped on an upraised root in the dirt and fell backward, twisting to land on her side, and agony flared up her arm where she landed badly on her shoulder. The breath flew from her lungs, and stars and darkness mixed her mind into a swill of confused that left her stunned, paralyzed. The stars and planets and galaxies that swam in front of her eyes were real and spinning and she was _falling falling falling_ —

Softness, on the back of her neck.

Fingers curling into her hair.

Flowery perfume made her heart ache.

Galaxies returned to their proper axes of motion, and planets fell back into their orbits around stars that found their slots in the cosmos again, and Nicole was on the ground. Waverly sat beside her in the dirt, hands on either side of her neck, keeping her head still. She was afraid; Nicole could feel her hands shaking against her skin.

“Nicole?” She asked in a voice that was so small, so gentle, Nicole wanted to live in it—she wanted to live right there, in that moment, with Waverly. Let the world end right then, and she would make her peace with it.

But the clock moved on, and it was only a moment in time.

“I’m so sorry,” Nicole whispered, though she wasn’t sure if she was apologizing to Waverly, or simply apologizing in general, for everything. “I fucked up. I’m so sorry.”

“How—what happened?” Waverly urged. “Please tell me. Let me help you, Nicole. Please.”

Nicole shook her head, then hissed, eyes squeezing shut tight again. “I can’t—they’re going to hurt you—and—and Wynonna—and Dolls—and Nana—and everyone. They’re going to hurt _everyone_ , Wave, and it’s all my fault.”

“Hey,” Waverly lifted her up, carefully, into a sitting position, pushing some of the hair out of her eyes with soft fingers that Nicole couldn’t help but follow, pushing her uninjured cheek into Waverly’s palm until Waverly understood what she wanted. She cradled her face in hand, thumb rubbing across the dark freckle on her cheekbone. Nicole swallowed thickly, eyes closed and leaning heavily into it, letting warmth leech into her skin from that hand. Greedily soaking in its heat, its comfort, its kindness. Hoarding its softness into herself, guilt dripping sick inside her ribcage. “Tell me what happened, _please_. Who did this to you?”

A tear traced down her cheek, following the seam between her cheek and Waverly’s fingertip. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I—I fucked up, Waverly. I fucked up so bad. I—I hurt you. You’re _going_ to get hurt because of me.”

“It’s okay, whatever it is, we can fix it. And no one’s hurt me, Nicole. I’m fine, I promise. You didn’t hurt me.”

Nicole shook her head. “No, they’re—they will. They’re going to.”

Waverly shook her head, too, a playful smile on her face. “Nah, they won’t. I’m too tough. I can take ‘em.”

Nicole didn’t laugh. “They’re _dangerous_ , Wave. Please, just—just leave me alone. I can’t—I can’t lose you, too.”

And until she said it, she hadn’t realized just how true those words really were. She had only just met this woman. She didn’t even know her favourite food. They were practically still strangers, and yet there was something about her. There was a _Feeling_ , in the pit of Nicole’s stomach, that said Waverly was someone she would lay her life down for. Someone who, at some point in the future that Nicole couldn’t see, would mean the world to her. It was like her heart already knew how to feel about Waverly; time simply had yet to catch up.

Waverly said nothing, for a moment, stunned silent by the admission. Shock was apparent on her face, and her thumb stilled in its careful strokes back and forth across Nicole’s cheek. Then she softened, bringing their foreheads together, and it was the closest thing Nicole had to confirmation that Waverly felt the same, even without knowing how or why. “You won’t lose me, Nicole,” she whispered in the dark, the tips of their noses _just_ brushing together, breath warm on Nicole’s lips, and Nicole had never wanted anything more in her life than she wanted to curl her arms around Waverly in that moment, to hold her so tight, so close, that they forgot they were ever two separate people, once upon a time. “I promise. Do you trust me?”

_More than I thought I could trust anything in the entire universe_.

“Yes.”

“Then believe me when I say, it’s all going to be okay. We’ll figure this out, whatever it is. But you have to tell me what’s going on. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good,” she leaned back, looking Nicole in the eyes, and Nicole felt like something more moving than Van Gogh’s _Starry Night_ could have been painted right there, for the way the stars seemed to move and twinkle all around her in the night. For once, she understood what Van Gogh had seen: The way colours could pulse around something as important and otherworldly as a star, or the most wonderful girl who could ever exist. “Now, come on. Come back to my car and tell me what happened, okay?”

“Okay.” 

* * *

Twenty minutes later, they sat in Waverly’s car, parked in a clearing somewhere in the trees, just off the side of the road and a little way into the forest. Nicole was wrapped in a hoodie Waverly had had in her back seat, hugging it tightly around her. It was a little worn and fraying around the cuffs of the sleeves, but it was warm, and it smelled like Waverly’s perfume, so she had taken it greedily the moment it was offered to her and hadn’t stop clinging to it since.

Waverly was leaned over the center console between them, trying to disinfect the cut on her cheek with an antiseptic wipe from the first aide kit in her glovebox. As she inspected the rest of Nicole (or, as much of her as Nicole would allow, which wasn’t much, because Nicole knew how many bruises she would find if she looked everywhere and it made shame curl a terrible claw into her stomach every time Waverly found a new injury on her and winced at how painful it looked) Nicole had spilled everything.

Or, she tried to. It was a clumsy explanation, with a lot of backtracking and stumbling and stuttering—how the Wolf Woman had blackmailed her into coming to Purgatory to spy on them, why she had gone to find them in the BBD office, what she had to lose, what had happened in the warehouse barely an hour ago. How she had betrayed Waverly’s trust before she had even really had it. How she had just doomed them all by not doing what was asked of her, because of her damn sense of loyalty that wasn’t worth the trouble it caused.

When she was done, Waverly was silent for a few minutes, processing everything Nicole had told her. She cleaned up the empty wrappers of antiseptic wipes and band aids, dropping them into an empty paper coffee cup to be thrown out later. Wiping her own hands on a tissue, she finally spoke. “So… to clarify… you came to Purgatory to spy on me, my sister, her partner, and all our other colleagues, for a woman who beat you, threatened both you and your family, and even when she had a gun pressed directly to your head, you didn’t tell her anything?”

Nicole shook her head, throat closing in on itself. “No, I…” Her hands shook in her lap. “I couldn’t. You just… you didn’t deserve that. I’m sorry.”

Waverly looked at her in confusion. “Sorry for what, Nicole?”

Nicole blinked. “For… for fucking up like this. For putting you in danger. For agreeing to betray you.”

“She threatened your family, Nicole. Your grandmother. You were just doing what you thought was best to protect the ones you love.” She spoke in a flat, logical tone, like all this was the most obvious thing in the world. “And then you didn’t give her anything, even when she was going to kill you, because you didn’t want to betray us. You didn’t do _anything_ wrong, Nic. You did the best you could with the cards you were dealt in the moment.”

“But I…” Nicole started to disagree, but Waverly stopped her with a finger pressed against her lips, silencing her immediately.

“No, listen to me,” she ordered, and Nicole could only nod dutifully, agreeing. “You did nothing wrong, Nicole. None of this is your fault. You had no choice. This woman, whoever she is, she threatened the only family you had left. She backed you into a corner to do what she wanted, and then you didn’t do it because you thought it was wrong. Fuck the consequences, you still did what was right. This is on _her_ for hurting you. It’s not on you for doing the best you could. Okay?”

Nicole nodded, but her eyes were downcast, looking at her lap. Waverly tapped the underside of her chin, lightly, prompting her to look up. She did, meeting Waverly’s eyes and finding a fire in them that she hadn’t expected to see. A determination to make Nicole see what she saw. An earnestness, insisting that Nicole believe her.

And Nicole wanted to— _God_ , she wanted to. She wanted to see the world the way Waverly did, with such softness and care, with a heart that never let the darkness in. She wanted to see herself the way Waverly saw.

But all she saw was a pair of hazel eyes that held no disappointment in her yet.

( _Yet_.)

Waverly moved her hand, now cupping her jaw with her palm, fingers lost in her hair matted with dirt, the way she had noticed Nicole liked. Soft, always so soft, she saw Nicole melt in the touch, eyes closing as tiredness etched its way across her face, pulling her lips into a frown and creasing her eyebrows worriedly. Everything about her screamed resignation, wanting to give up, wanting to stop fighting, and it made Waverly’s chest burn in agony for the woman that had been stolen away by the cruelty of fate. She had once been softer than water, she could tell. She hadn’t always been this gruff, this damaged, but the world had made her so.

Nicole sighed, heavy and spent, twisting her face in Waverly’s palm until her lips pressed against the inside of her wrist, ghosting a kiss to the skin there as if it were an old habit, something their bodies knew to do on instinct.

Her eyes stayed closed for a long moment, leaning heavily into Waverly’s hand. Waverly watched her, wondering what was happening in her mind that seemed to make her shoulders bow under it’s weight. Whatever it was, Waverly found herself wanting to help— _needing_ to help. She couldn’t explain why, but it was something she felt in the pit of her stomach. A pre-existing predilection that told her that Nicole Haught was someone she needed to keep safe.

Finally, Nicole let out a heavy breath through her nose, and her eyes cracked open, though she didn’t look up, only keeping her gaze on her lap, eyelids hooded and lashes ghosting her cheeks in tired resignation. In a voice so small Waverly had to strain to hear it, she asked, “Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to see the future?”

Waverly paused for a moment, thrown by the sudden thought, then shrugged. The shadows playing across Nicole’s face made her not want to question it, though. “I, uh… I don’t think so.”

Nicole nodded pensively. She played with the hem of her sweater, silent for another beat before continuing in a ghostly quiet voice, as if she was speaking of something she shouldn’t be—as though it was a secret she was supposed to have taken to the grave. “Momma… Momma said it felt like watching a movie that was so good you didn’t notice anything else happening around you while you watched it.”

Waverly furrowed her brow. _Her Momma knew what it felt like…?_ But still, she said nothing. It looked like Nicole was fighting to even get the words out; she didn’t need Waverly’s interruptions.

“Nana said it was more like stepping into a shower after _weeks_ of trekking in the forest, if the water was knowing things, and it would just wash over you, all warm and refreshing and you felt like it made you a new person for just a minute…” She shook her head once more, as if trying to shoo memories away from her mind. “I could never see the future, though. Momma said the Universe is real selective about who can do that, and I guess… I didn’t get _that_ family trait, not quite, y’know?”

No, Waverly didn’t. “Nicole…?”

Nicole played with the zipper of her hoodie, flicking the toggle back and forth distractedly. Waverly let her hand drop from her cheek to those fidgeting hands, stilling them in her lap. Nicole chuckled, though there was no humour in it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I… I don’t think I’ve _ever_ had to explain this to anyone. I’m probably not great at it.”

“Explain what?” But Waverly’s mind was already reeling, beginning to figure it out before Nicole could even say it.

“The reason that woman—I started calling her the Wolf Woman, in my head. It’s—it’s this thing I saw once in Quebec.” She swallowed, hard, taking a deep breath. “The reason she picked me for this job—for coming here, for spying on you. She… she needed someone who wasn’t exactly… _normal_ , I suppose. And—and I know you’ll kind of understand, I mean, you’ve seen weirder things than me, probably, and you won’t have too much trouble believing me, I hope, but I—it’s one more thing you should know about… everything.”

_About me_ , she seemed to want to say, instead.

She looked guilty again, for whatever she was tripping over herself trying to say, and it tore Waverly to bits inside to see just how much guilt she carried with her every day of her life. “Nicole…” she said, tenderly, in that sweet-as-pie voice that made everything on Nicole’s shoulders weigh down even more. “Nicole, whatever it is, I can handle it. It’s okay.”

Nicole nodded, looking vaguely nauseated. “No, I know, I know, it’s just… Okay, you know a lot about local history and supernatural stuff, right?” Waverly nodded; she did, indeed, know a lot about the _otherworldly_ aspects of the Ghost River County. It would be hard not to, seeing as her entire life was basically a Goosebumps novel soaked in whiskey. “Okay, so you’ve probably heard of my grandmother, Ava Keelan…? They—they call her _Bean an tí_ , sometimes. It’s Irish Gaelic, it means—”

“ _Mother of the House_ ,” Waverly translated in a breath, understanding dawning in her eyes, along with a million questions she couldn’t even list yet. “The Matriarch. The… the Matriarch is your grandmother?”

Of course Waverly had heard of her. Well—heard the folklore of her, really. The kindly old woman who lived in a farmhouse somewhere on the other side of the Triangle and was the one to go to if you needed a sneak peek at something coming. Old magic, they called her. The last echo of the Old Gods. At least, those were the tales.

Nicole blushed, but nodded, eyes trained sternly on the zipper pinched between her fingertips. “Yeah, and, uh… well, I mean, I got her hair colour, and her nose, and her, um… _extrasensory abilities_ , I guess.”

Waverly tried not to let her jaw drop to the ground, mind reeling. “You _guess_?”

“Well,” Nicole considered this. “It’s not _exactly_ like what Nana can do—I mean, _no one_ can do what Nana can do, really—and I get feelings when something is about to happen, sometimes, but that’s about it for the future, and I don’t even know what those feelings mean until after a fact. But what I can do, it’s more like… do you know the myth of Janus?”

Waverly thought for a second. The name sounded familiar, a small part of distant memories from her first-year classics lecture. “The Roman god of beginnings, transitions, time, duality…” She furrowed her brow, and Nicole wanted to reach out with her thumb to smooth the wrinkles. Her hands stayed still in her lap, though. “He was said to have two faces; one that looks forward, to the future, and one that looks back into the past.”

“Exactly,” Nicole said. “Everyone’s like that—they have their regular face, you know, the one that actually, um, _exists_ , and then another one Underneath. I called it the Under Face when I was a kid. It’s like the face of everything you actually _are_ as a person; everything you’ve been through and everything you feel and how you feel it and why you feel it. It’s like a representation of all your pain, your personality, your history—it’s _you_ , in the most metaphysical sense. And when I look at someone, I can see that. It flickers up to the surface, without me trying. If I focus enough, sometimes I can kind of… I don’t know, read your memories a bit? I can’t choose what I get from someone’s mind, I just see, um, I guess the greatest hits? The most significant parts of your life so far, I can kind of read them. It’s not an exact science—more of a parlour trick, really. But,” she shrugged, her nervous rambling coming to a stumbling halt. “That’s what I can do as a… a Seer.”

Waverly was silent, and Nicole was too scared to look up from her lap. She was terrified of seeing in Waverly’s face the kind of horror that she felt whenever she really _thought_ about what it was she could do. She could weasel her way into someone’s mind, without their permission. She could see their struggles, their pain—everything they didn’t want to ever see the light of day. Everything they kept locked up tight in the darkest parts of their mind, she could find, and she could rip from them, as easily as blinking.

She hated that. No one should be allowed to do that. Everyone deserved to have their privacy, their secrets. Everyone deserved the dignity of being able to hide whatever it was that they were too ashamed to let out of their head. And yet she could take without permission, if she wanted to. She could rob someone of their dignity, and they could do nothing to stop her.

She hated herself for having that power.

Waverly hadn’t spoken for several long moments, taking in the information given to her and processing it all, bit by bit, filing it away in her mind in neat little piles for later use. Finally, she took a shaky breath. “So does that mean you’ve been able to tell what I’ve been thinking _every_ time I stared at your ass?”

Nicole blinked in surprise, confusion all over her face as she finally looked up to Waverly’s face. “What?”

“I mean, it just doesn’t seem very fair.” Waverly said frankly. “I have to go about flirting with you the old-fashioned way, and you get a whole cheat sheet for it, no extra effort necessary. That’s just unfair.”

“You’re… you’re not, like, scared of me?” Nicole asked, completely and utterly baffled by Waverly’s seemingly very serious accusation that she’s been cheating with flirting.

Her mind seemed to completely skip over the fact that, apparently, she _had_ been flirting, because focusing on that would have just been too much to wrap her head around. One thing at a time, and all.

Waverly raised an eyebrow. “ _Should_ I be scared of you?”

Her eyes widened in shock. “No, _no_ , never, I would _never_ do anything to hurt you.”

“Then that’s that settled,” Waverly nodded confidently. “I’ll still keep holding it over you that you’ve been cheating with the flirting. I’m thinking you owe me _at least_ a dinner date for that.”

Nicole’s jaw dropped to the floor, dumbstruck by her gall. She floundered, trying her best to put even two words together in her mind. “Wh… you… are you using my own psychic powers against me to extort a date from me? Is that what’s happening right now?”

Waverly shrugged a single shoulder, shyness suddenly seeming to reoccur to her. She blushed, a small smile curving her lips. “Would… would you say yes, if I was?” Her voice was small, uncertain.

Nicole let her eyes find Waverly’s in the dim glow of the overhead lights—and sure, maybe it was _technically_ cheating, because Waverly couldn’t peak into her mind the way she could Waverly’s—but she let her eyes scrape the surface of Waverly’s Underneath, just a bit. It was nervous, yes, and maybe a little hopeful, maybe a little awestruck. But beneath all that, surrounding every part of her, it was afraid. Afraid Nicole would say no. Afraid she had read things wrong. Afraid someone else would say they didn’t want her, either.

Despite the entire night she had had so far—being abducted barely an hour ago, being tied up and beaten, having her entire life and family threatened and promised to be destroyed—the Sight of Waverly’s fear made her heart clench. She was frayed on the inside, fragile and breaking, but so was Waverly, and Waverly had been breaking for a lot longer than she had.

“You’re doing it right now, aren’t you?” Waverly asked a little dreamily, in barely more than a whisper.

“Doing what?” Nicole teased, a light smile on her tired lips, voice just as soft.

“Cheating,” Waverly said. “You’re getting into my head, aren’t you?”

Nicole shrugged single shoulder. “It’s not cheating. It’s just using my resources.”

Waverly gave her an impish smile, leaning forward almost unconsciously, and Nicole couldn’t help but follow suit, leaning forward so that there was only a center console-sized space between them. “Okay, so tell me what _you’re_ thinking, then. Make this an even playing field—since no one’s cheating here.”

Nicole paused, Waverly’s Underneath taking on an air of eagerness—she wanted, really _wanted_ , to know what Nicole was thinking. Nicole couldn’t remember the last time someone wanted that. She thought for a moment, taking that in. Taking in everything about Waverly, right then. Her eagerness to learn what went on in Nicole’s head. The way she had leaned forward, resting her forearms on the console, eyes focused on her own like there was nothing else around them. Honesty, after all this time, was a difficult thing for Nicole to reach for, but she couldn’t lie, here, in the space between them. This moment felt too honest for her to hold anything back.

“I’m thinking… I’m thinking that I’m exhausted, and I want nothing more than to curl up in bed for 40 hours consecutively, and I’m thinking that want to protect my family no matter what, and I…” She paused, swallowed, honesty flooding her mind like someone had cracked the dam. “I think you, Waverly Earp, might just turn out to be the most wonderful person I’ve ever met, and I think it scares the hell out of me to think how much you might mean to me one day, and how much I could learn to depend on you, because I don’t even know if I can do that anymore, but then I think about how it sounds when you say my name, and how I can literally, _actually_ feel my heart skip a beat when you laugh, and I—I think—”

She honestly wasn’t even really sure what she might have said next, if Waverly hadn’t curled a fist into the lapel of her hoodie and pulled her into a bruising kiss that made all thought fall from her head at once.

She melted into it without question; she wasn’t in charge of herself. Her mind simply followed along with the way her body curved down a path it seemed to know by heart, kissing Waverly more deeply, holding onto the hand on her lapel as if it would stop the world from spinning out from beneath her. Breathing her in as it felt like the tattered old heart she held within her for so long had finally risen from its slumber.

Waverly pulled back all too quickly, leaving her chasing for more, almost falling over the center console between them. She giggled, awarding Nicole a softer kiss this time, just quickly, savouring the way Nicole seemed to breathe with her, before leaning their foreheads together. Nicole could feel her eyelashes fluttering butterfly kisses on her cheeks, and she wanted to stay there forever.

Fuck the rest of the world, let it burn, if only she could stay in this one moment for the rest of time.

They sat like that for a while, both leaning far across the center console, with Nicole’s thumb tracing soft patterns on the inside of Waverly’s wrist as Waverly still held her firm, close, not letting her get away.

(Not that Nicole would even _want_ to get away from Waverly. Not now.)

(Not ever.)

Neither spoke, or dared move an inch, both very conscious of the mutability of this moment; how fragile this peace was that existed between them. The rest of the world still lay outside the car, monsters lying in wait for them to blink and shatter the silence. But for right then, there was nothing but the two of them and the way Nicole’s breathing caressed Waverly’s cheek like a summer breeze.

But moments really are just that: Just a snapshot of a larger scene. Not meant to last forever.

Nicole took a staggering breath, sobering through the haze of Waverly’s perfume in her nose and Waverly’s smudged lipstick on her lips and Waverly’s nose brushing against hers that made Nicole dizzy at the sensations. Sobering, but she didn’t pull away.

( _Couldn’t_ pull away.)

(Frozen, transfixed, stuck in this position that made Nirvana feel like a letdown.)

“I’m scared,” she rasped, her voice deathly silent but still shattering the hold they had had on time. “I can… I can _Feel_ something coming, Wave, and I think it leads to you, but I don’t know what it means, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Waverly’s heart cracked in two.

“I won’t,” Waverly assured her softly, her voice a euphonious coo compared to Nicole’s strained croaks.

“You can’t know that.” Nicole disagreed, feeling utterly helpless as thoughts of the unfairness of fate began to return to her mind, where they had been banished momentarily by the unbelievable feeling of Waverly’s lips on hers. “Fate’s already got a plan for us, and what if—”

“What if the world ends tomorrow?” Waverly cut her off, though not unkindly. “What if an asteroid collides with Earth and smashes us all to smithereens? What if this is all just a computer simulation and we don’t really exist in the physical world? There’s nothing we can do about the future, right?”

Nicole shook her head, swallowing thickly. “No,” she said. “No, it’s all pretty much written in stone, I think.”

“Then fuck it.” Waverly said. “Fuck it all, for the moment. Fuck tomorrow, Nicole. Fuck every day after that and just… just stay here, right now.”

_With me_.

“But—”

“Nicole.” Waverly brought her other hand that wasn’t on Nicole’s sweater up to tangle in her dirty hair, and Nicole’s one free hand found its way around her waist, pulling her up slightly so that she was halfway across the console already. “There are literally an infinite number of _what-ifs_ that could happen tomorrow. A plane could crash into us on the street. We could be killed by demons. We could be killed by Wynonna and a doughnut. Albeit, some of those situations are more likely than others, but the laws of probability say they could all technically still happen. You can’t be sure of anything, really, besides right now.”

Nicole pulled away from Waverly then, just slightly, still holding onto her but moving far enough away that she could look Waverly in the eyes. So that Waverly could see the fear, the uncertainty in hers. “And what, just say _fuck it_ to everything that could go wrong—that _will_ go wrong?”

“No,” Waverly shook her head firmly, pushing herself across the console now so that she was sitting in Nicole’s lap, straddling her with one leg on either side of her hips. Nicole was stricken by the movement, a light blush moving up her neck and cheeks to the tips of her ears, but she didn’t object, didn’t move away. Instead, her arms curled more securely around Waverly’s waist, pulling her closer, and Waverly wound her hands around her neck, cradling the back of her head, fingernails lightly scratching a slow rhythm at the base of her scalp. “No, don’t… don’t say _fuck it_ to that, just…” She bit her lip, trying to figure out what she was trying to say. “Just say _fuck it_ to fate. Fate can’t tell us what to do. Fate isn’t going to show up and tell us to stop, because something could go wrong tomorrow. Is it?”

Nicole considered this. “I suppose not, no.”

“Then who cares? The only thing you’ve got to do is what makes you happy.”

Nicole looked at her a moment, considering this greatly. Waverly could practically see the gears turning in her mind, churning this new idea, vetting it through a lifetime of being told that the future was set in stone and what happens is What Happens, no one gets any say in it. Waverly was struck by what that must have been like for Nicole, being raised by a family of psychics who could tell her anything about her future at a moment’s notice. It would take the surprise out of the important things. It would make everything feel inevitable, and completely out of her control, like she wasn’t allowed to ever drive the car, only sit in the passenger’s seat and end up wherever she ended up. It would make things feel useless, too, probably—like it was useless to make any decisions, because they had already been made for her, preordained by fate, so that no decision was ever _really_ a decision, only a divine decree already written in the stars.

And, Waverly thought, how depressingly existential it would be to live like that. How horribly Camusian.

Nicole looked at her with tragic eyes. “But what if I don’t know how to do what makes me happy?”

“Well, what do you want to do right now?” Waverly asked. “What would make you happy right in this very moment?”

“Right now?” Nicole frowned, thinking for a moment before looking back up to meet Waverly’s eyes. She frowned, still, but under Waverly’s gaze she softened, blushing slightly, big doe eyes becoming bashful, and it made Waverly want to melt right into her. Nicole bit her lip, uncertain. Slowly, quietly, as if asking permission, “Right now I think I want to kiss you again.”

Waverly chuckled, already drawing nearer, enjoying the way that cute hesitation made her heart pound in her chest. She mumbled against her lips, eyes closed but feeling the small smile pull at Nicole’s face, “See? You’re getting better at this already.”

A laugh bubbled up in Nicole’s chest, giddy and maybe even a little hopeful too, swallowed by Waverly’s soft lips again and again and again, and underneath the stars, it felt like white hot rebellion in her bones. 

* * *

Wynonna sat rubbing her temples, trying to tell herself that _murder is illegal, murder is illegal, murder is illegal_. “Okay,” she said, releasing a long sigh through her nose. “Okay, let me see if I have this right. You,” she pointed an accusing finger at Nicole, who sat in the armchair across the coffee table from her, looking like a deer caught in the headlights, about to be mowed down by an 18-wheeler, “are a psychic who was hired by some mystery woman in killer heels to come to Purgatory, infiltrate BBD, and spy on us?”

Nicole worried at her lip for a moment before nodding. “Yes,” she said in a small voice, guilt obvious on her face. That was some sort of consolation to Wynonna. At least she felt _bad_ about what she did.

“And _you_ , darling sister,” she turned her accusing finger to Waverly, who sat on the coffee table between her and Nicole, probably to act as a buffer if necessary. Which, given the situation and the Buckingham Palace-sized ball of annoyance growing in her chest right then, was probably a pretty good idea. “ _You_ are telling me to help her anyway?”

Waverly was much more confident in her answer. “Yes.”

“And why, pray tell, the actual _fuck_ would I _ever_ do that?” She seethed, enunciating every syllable so that it drove into Nicole like a barrage of gunfire, and Nicole shrunk back in her seat, seeming as if she was trying to fold in on herself. Trying to take up as little space as possible.

Waverly sighed, looking exasperated at her sister. “She needs help, Wy. She needs _our_ help. They threatened her family.” She gave Wynonna a _look_ , a distinct and pointed _you-know-that-the-fuck-I’m-referring-to_ look. “Surely you can understand why she did it.”

Guilt twisted at Wynonna’s stomach, pulling her anger back into check, threatening to let _those_ memories come flooding back to her, and— _No, no, don’t let yourself get pulled under again. Not right now._ She sighed, pushing a hand through her unkempt hair. “Low fucking blow, Waves,” she muttered grumpily, but she knew Waverly was right. Of course. Waverly was _always_ right. That’s why she was the smart one. “I don’t even know _how_ we could help her—we’ve got no idea who’s doing this, or why, or how to find them, or _any_ possible leads on _anything_. All we’ve got is a battered ginger psychic who, no offence, literally has _just_ admitted to having a very recent history of lying to us.”

Waverly said nothing to that. It was true, they had no leads on anything. She hadn’t gotten _that_ far in planning just yet. The farthest she’d gotten was coaxing Nicole into coming back to the Homestead with her (which had involved many long, toe-curling minutes of kissing and the promise of more later, when they weren’t parked in the forest in the middle of the night like two teenagers out past curfew) and waking Wynonna up in the middle of the night to tell her everything. Which is where they stood now, sitting in the living room, three empty coffee cups between them and the clock on the wall reading just past four in the morning. Wynonna sat on the couch, nestled back into a large pile of decorative pillows, wearing only a pair of ripped old boxers and a baggy Purgatory PD training t-shirt and looking like she might just grab Peacemaker and try to blow them both to Hell for waking her up well before the ass-crack of dawn.

Nicole cleared her throat, and both pairs of eyes swivelled to her. She shrank back in her seat. “I, um. I might have an idea.”

“Oh, halle- _fucking_ -lujah,” Wynonna snapped, and this time Waverly swatted her knee sharply, hissing at her to “ _Shut the fuck up for once, you shit-ticket_.” She stuck her tongue out at her baby sister but moved her knees away all the same. Waverly gave her one last steely glare before turning back to Nicole, and Wynonna noted the way her gaze instantly melted on her. It was a visible deflation, a definitive decrease in anger by at least five notches when she looked at Nicole. Wynonna knew her baby sister well enough to know what it meant when something or some _one_ softened her around the edges like this.

(And, contrary to popular opinion, Wynonna wasn’t _totally_ oblivious. She could see Waverly’s lipstick smeared on Nicole’s neck.)

“Fine,” Wynonna muttered, chastised. “What’s the idea, Haught-line Bling?”

“Well,” Nicole started, fiddling with a loose thread on the cuff of her sweater— _Waverly’s_ sweater, actually, Wynonna noticed. The one she’d gotten in third year of her undergrad, from her department. It had her last name printed on the back, like a letterman jacket. Nicole clung to it like it was giving her life. “It’s something the woman said tonight—I… I think she slipped up, I don’t think she meant to say it. But, she called Dolls _X_ , and I know I only met him a couple of days ago, but he really doesn’t seem like the kind of person to let people call him something like _X_ , so I was thinking, maybe… I think he knows her. Like, knows her really well. And, well, she knew what I am when she found me—she had an actual _file_ on me, and I know for a fact that the only file on me that exists and includes any mention of supernatural abilities is my file in the Registry, which she would have access to if she was part of Black Badge, so…”

Any and all sarcastic comments promptly fell right out of Wynonna’s head as she leaned forward, now actually intrigued by what this woman had to say. “So you think BBD is corrupt and hired you to spy on one of its own agents?” Cautiously, Nicole nodded. Wynonna shrugged. A government organization, corrupt? Water, wet? Shocking. “I’m surprised it took this long for something like this to pop up, actually.”

“Why would BBD hire you to spy on Dolls, though?” Waverly asked, looking as if she was already plotting out fifty different moves ahead in this game of chess they still didn’t understand completely.

“I don’t know,” Nicole said, leaning forward in her chair, head in her hands and elbows on her knees. “I just know she said a ‘ _little birdy_ ’ gave her my name, but that’d be impossible.”

“Why?” Wynonna asked.

Nicole just shrugged. “Because no one outside of my family knows that I have any psychic abilities at all. I’ve never told anyone, _ever_ , until tonight…” At that, her eyes flicked to Waverly, and a small smile pressed dimples into her cheeks so sweetly Wynonna thought she might vomit, but Waverly returned the smile with such softness that she held herself back. “And no one in my family would say anything, so she had to have found me another way.”

“What, did she just look up hot single psychics in her area?” Wynonna challenged, raising an eyebrow.

“Maybe,” Nicole said. “Maybe she just looked through the Registry until she found someone who fit the bill.”

“Okay, time out, gonna need a footnote on that,” Wynonna stopped, holding her hands up in a _T_. “The Registry is… what, exactly?”

Nicole began to open her mouth to explain, but Waverly beat her to it, twisting on the coffee table to her sister, sitting cross-legged and clutching her coffee cup tightly. She was tired, Wynonna could tell. Bags pulled beneath her eyes, and her shoulders drooped under the weight of all the hours she had been awake. She’d been up late again, at the library, working on her dissertation. Still, the history lesson sprang from her like it was second nature—and, as Wynonna had begun to learn since she had returned to Purgatory last year, it _was_ second nature to her.

“1899, Sir Wilfrid Laurier was Prime Minister, right?” Wynonna nodded, though she only knew this because she’d spent so many Oktoberfest weekends at Wilfrid Laurier University. Not that she could, exactly, remember all of them, but that was neither here nor there. “At the time, supernatural creatures are just kind of doing their own thing, but Laurier decided there ought to be some sort of census to keep track of them all. And thus, he began the Registry. It started out as just a simple survey they filled out—name, date, place of birth, and classification of supernatural being. You know, just to count numbers and whatnot. Roosevelt started BBD in 1903 as a special division of the US Marshalls, and in 1908 Roosevelt and Laurier decided to join the two organizations into one cross-boarder supernatural tracking and law-enforcing division. And thus, the BBD we all know and love today was born.”

“The Registry acts as an extension of Stats Canada nowadays,” Nicole continued, taking over from the history lesson Waverly had provided, segueing into her point. “It keeps track of who the supernatural beings are in Canada—the US has their own version, too, through the Census Bureau—and the Registry computer servers all have binding and tracking runes programmed into them, so all our files automatically update with our current name, age, and place of residence.”

“So it’s like a supernatural White Pages?” Wynonna asked.

“If the White Pages also had everything CSIS, the FBI, and the DHS ever knew about you, then yes.” Nicole said. “Every supernatural has to get Registered when they’re born or turned or manifest their powers or whatever. Momma took me to get Registered when I started showing my abilities, when I was four.”

At that, Waverly stopped, head tilting to the side in curiosity. She turned back around to Nicole. “Four?”

Nicole blushed. “Um. Yeah.”

“Isn’t that—”

“Really young?” Waverly nodded. “Yeah.”

“Do you think that’s why she chose you?” Waverly asked. “Because your file probably stood out, for being unique like that?”

“I don’t know,” Nicole shrugged earnestly. “Maybe it was that. Maybe she saw my ancestral line and decided I’d probably be just as powerful as the rest of my family.”

Wynonna could only follow about half of what they were saying, but that didn’t seem to bother either of them—they spoke as if she wasn’t even there. Irritated, she cleared her throat. “Uh, excuse me? Mrs. and Mrs. Holmes?” Both women looked back at her, startled, as if they had genuinely forgotten she was even there. And she didn’t miss the way a light blush peppered across Nicole’s cheeks at her words, either, but she bit back the low jibe at that. “Lovely. So glad to be included once again. So what’s the plan? Use the Registry to find this woman?”

Nicole said nothing, eyes clouding with something that, if Wynonna knew her better, she might have been able to identify as guilt. Nicole frowned, looking to Waverly, brows furrowed, as if willing Waverly to understand what she was thinking, and Waverly did. She looked to her baby sister, who nodded and looked at her.

“No,” Waverly said nervously. “We use Dolls.” 

* * *

In the end, after nearly an hour of Wynonna and Waverly arguing back and forth the ethics of mindreading—

_“I mean, come on Wy, is it_ really _an invasion of privacy if it’s for the greater good?”_

_“I don’t fucking care if the Da Vinci code is locked in his head and she’s the only one who can get it out to stop the entire goddamn Illuminati from ending the world, Waves, I am_ not _letting some box-to-bottle gingersnap into his head!”_

_“Um, this is my natural hair colour, actually.”_

_“Oh, my God, you just_ want _me to shoot you, don’t you?”_

—two rounds from a shotgun, fired off into the night sky (both by Waverly, when Wynonna had tried to drag Nicole out onto the porch and physically kick her off their property herself)—

_“What the actual literal_ shit _is your problem, Wynonna?”_

_“I don’t trust her!”_

_“Well I do, so put up or shut up!”_

—and three shots of tequila (all Wynonna’s, who refused to share, claiming she needed something to take the edge off or she might just have to feed Nicole to the mutant crocogator)—

_“We don’t have a crocogator, Wynonna. Those don’t even exist.”_

_“Shut_ up _, Waves, she doesn’t know that!”_

—it was decided that it was probably best if Wynonna called Dolls to get him up to speed. Apparently, he and someone named Doc were currently somewhere out near Fort McMurray, chasing down a lead of some kind. Wynonna hadn’t elaborated, but Waverly seemed to understand what she meant nonetheless.

The hour hand was just striking five in the morning when Wynonna moved into the kitchen to call Dolls, leaving the other two alone in the living room. Nicole sat nervously in her chair, rubbing at a spot of mud splashed on her forearm. She had tried to wash up as much as she could in the bathroom, when Waverly had brought them home and gone to wake up Wynonna, but there was only so much one could do with a wash cloth and a tap that only ran a weak stream of lukewarm water. Her muscles ached, and she could feel the sting of cuts and scratches on the pads of her feet from the rocky road she had been trudging down barefoot.

Any and all adrenaline from the night had started to leak out of her bloodstream the second she sat in this overstuffed armchair that had a nearly absurdly large pile of decorative pillows piled upon it, so that now she was just tired. Tired and spent, and her eyes pulsed every time she blinked, painstakingly dragging them open every time. God, she couldn’t remember a time she was ever _this_ tired. Not even after that three-day bender on St. Patrick’s Day her second year of university.

(She remembered showing up to that first frat party, bedecked all in green and telling herself she would only have a few drinks, and then it was three days later, she had a hoop pierced through her left ear cartilage that she hadn’t had before, a new werewolf girlfriend she didn’t remember meeting but had called her mother about, and she could no longer stomach rum. That was all she knew of that weekend, but apparently it had been epic. She just had to take everyone else’s word on that.)

“What does it feel like?” Waverly asked, suddenly, rousing Nicole from her drowsy train of thought. Nicole blinked, looking up at her, eyes wide and face pale in the ill lighting of the floor lamp nearby.

“What does what feel like?” Nicole asked, trying not to trip over her own tongue in her fatigue.

“The…” She gestured to her head, trying to find the right words for it. “The mindreading, I guess. Is Dolls going to feel anything? Is… is it going to hurt him?” Her last words were a whisper, worried and unsure, and Nicole couldn’t help herself. She reached out, catching Waverly’s nervous hand in her own, finding it going slack the moment their skin met. She held the hand in the space between them, entwining their fingers. Waverly looked down, some of the concern melting away from her face as her eyes followed Nicole’s gentle hand massaging her own.

“I _promise_ it’s not going to hurt him,” Nicole assured her. “I will be as careful as I possibly can, okay? I won’t go near anything I’m not supposed to.”

Waverly nodded absently, eyes still watching their hands. “Can you do that? I mean, you said you don’t always have the best control over what you see…”

Nicole nodded at that. “I know,” she said. It was something that had crossed her mind. “But… I think I know how to find something specific in someone’s mind.”

“You think?” The worry was back, sharper than before, and Waverly’s hands tensed in hers. Understandable, really. Dolls was her friend. She needed to make sure he would be okay, above all else.

Nicole back peddled, trying to amend. “I mean, I think I know how to figure it out. I think I know who to ask.”

Waverly looked at her, expectant, waiting for her to elaborate, but when Nicole didn’t, she only nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll do my best to trust you on this.”

Nicole let out a heavy sigh. She knew it was a lot to ask, for Waverly to trust her without reason, and for Waverly to do it was no small thing, in her heart. “Thank you.”

They fell silent then, both staring listless at their hands held between them, both lost in thought. Well, Waverly was lost in thought. Nicole was mostly lost in one thought: _Tiredness isn’t technically an emotion, but it is, and I’m feeling it._

After a moment, Waverly took a small breath that sounded sharp and purposeful in the stillness of the living room, seeming to make up her mind about something. She looked like she wanted to say something else, but it was right then that Wynonna re-entered, clicking her phone off. Without thinking, Nicole let her hands slip from Waverly’s, taking them back into her own lap. Waverly tried not to pout, tried not to lament the loss of contact, the loss of warmth that was still so new. It was stupid anyway, wanting to keep the contact with this woman she had only just met.

(Still, she had the memories fresh in her mind, of Nicole beneath her, Nicole pressing up against her, Nicole’s hands finding purchase on her thighs, Nicole’s lips hot on her own and the greediness in her stomach making her pull closer, closer, _closer_.)

(She tried not to focus on them now, though, because now was an inappropriate time for that, and if she did, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to let Nicole go so easily.)

(She wasn’t sure she’d be able to let Nicole go, ever.)

Wynonna stood hovering in the doorway to the kitchen, playing with her phone in her hands, tapping the back of its case nervously. She looked somber, discomforted, eyes on her toes. “He said he’s in,” she said in a strained voice that was barely above a whisper. “Orders are to hold down the fort. Increase patrol, tell The Order to keep an eye out, let Nedley know something might be, uh… coming. He’ll be back from Fort McMurray as soon as he can. He just needs to finish up some business there…”

She looked to her sister then, eyes heavy with meaning. Waverly nodded; they both knew what kind of _business_ he and Doc were attending to.

Nicole looked between the two sisters, curiosity burgeoning in her eyes despite the fatigue making her eyelids feel like they were made of lead. She looked like she was about to ask, but Wynonna didn’t give her the chance. “Come on, Haught. I’ll give you a ride home.”

Waverly couldn’t help but want to argue with that; she wanted to be the one to take Nicole home, if Nicole had to go home at all. She could have stayed at the Homestead. It probably would have been safer for her to stay there, anyway. And it would give them a chance to talk. About earlier.

(About the memories she had, still so fresh on her skin that it was like Nicole was still there, still letting her kisses wander to Waverly’s neck, still letting her teeth nip and scrape with every kiss until Waverly would gasp, head falling back and breath shaking in her lungs because _it_ _wasn’t enough_ and _she wanted more_ and—)

She pushed past that, though. It was selfish of her. She didn’t want to crowd Nicole—Nicole had had a long night. She had had a long… some amount of time that Waverly didn’t know but wanted to help with, anyway. Nicole needed sleep, and Wynonna looked like she needed time to process. Get Nicole out of her living room and process.

Nicole looked relieved to be given the chance to go home and rest. She sighed, pushed a hand through her messy hair, and stood, giving Waverly a warm look. Warm, but tired. The smile was soft, but not strong enough to show her dimples. Not strong enough to make her eyes whisper anything other than, _Thank you_. Waverly stood after her, walking them to the door.

Wynonna left the house with a small wave to her sister, hopping off the porch and climbing into the bed of their Uncle Curtis’ old pickup, still barefoot and in her pajamas. Nicole hung back for half a second, though, pausing beside Waverly as she leaned against the doorframe. She looked up, soft brown eyes even softer in the yellow glow of the porchlight. Shadows cast down over her face made her look older than Waverly knew she was. More weathered than the rest of the world knew her to be.

“I’ll call you later?” She asked in a small voice, uncertain. Like she was asking permission, asking if Waverly would be okay with talking to her later. Waverly wondered if she meant simply talking or _talking_. Talking about what Waverly wanted to talk about. Talking about earlier. Talking about what seemed to be pulling them together—strings, weaving them in place, side by side on the Loom of Fate.

She smiled back and nodded. “Later,” she said warmly.

Nicole nodded, too. “Good night, Waverly.”

“Good night, Nicole.”

She watched Nicole go, climbing into the truck beside Wynonna, and the two of them pulling out of the long dirt drive that lead off their land. She watched them until the headlights disappeared in the darkness, and then she was alone. Tiredness hit her all at once, but she buzzed inside nevertheless. Sighing, she went back inside, wondering if she was going to get any sleep at all tonight. 

* * *

The drive into town was silent, for the most part. The car’s old radio played a staticky country song, broken in parts where they lost reception so far away from civilization. The Homestead was in the middle of nowhere, it seemed. But then again, everything was lost in a state of Nowhere, in Purgatory.

Nicole had been dozing, her head leaned back against the headrest, eyes closed and letting the car’s groaning and shaking quiet the buzz in her mind.

About halfway into town, Wynonna broke the silence. “I don’t trust you, Haught.”

Nicole cracked her eyes open with some effort. “I gathered that, yeah.”

Wynonna nodded, not taking her eyes off the road for a moment. “But Waverly seems to, or at least it seems like she’s starting to. And I trust my baby sister more than anything, so you’ve got that going for you here. She’s the only thing holding me back from putting your ass in the ground.”

“Figured that out, too.”

“But Dolls is my friend,” she said, and it didn’t seem like she was talking to Nicole directly anymore. Merely, it seemed like she was just talking. Stating facts for anyone who cared to hear them. “He’s my partner and my _friend_. And I _will_ take you out if you hurt him, got that? If you hurt _anyone_ I care about.”

Nicole could appreciate that. Loyalty was a powerful thing to have, when you had someone worth being loyal to. Loyalty could crush mountains and turn tides and win wars. And, the way things were going? It seemed like they might have a war to win, soon enough. So, she just nodded. “Got it.”

“Good.”

The rest of the drive was made in silence, but when they pulled up in front of Nicole’s apartment building, Wynonna said one thing more. “Get some rest, Haught Pocket. I have a feeling you might just bring a storm to Purgatory, and we all gotta be ready when it hits.”

Nicole couldn’t help but think she was right. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like to think of this chapter as "Existential Philosophy for Beginners ft. Thirsty Waverly." But there you have it! Everyone knows! I really didn't want to have Nicole and Waverly start Anything without there being complete honesty between them, which requires Nicole to come clean. Plus, the power of teamwork, y'all. The gang is gonna kick some ass, as a family. 
> 
> And yes, if anyone is curious (although I seriously doubt anyone is nearly as much of a pedant as I am, to wonder something like this) I did create my own entire history of supernaturals, the BBD, and their affiliation with Canadian politics. Ask me about William Lyon Mackenzie's use of werewolves during the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 on my Tumblr, [@astrophysical-bean](http://astrophysical-bean.tumblr.com/). 
> 
> Until next time!   
> \--Bean


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